Nils Gilman on AI and the university; Austin Scholar on status as a motivator; Howard Husock and Tao Tan on foundation money; Gad Levanon on the job recession in higher ed
Does the AI itself have this obsession with “uncertainty” and does that bear any relation to the timing of its training, after relativism was taken to a comic degree in academia?
I’m not trying to be snarky. I’m very far away in space and time from college, and a little puzzled by the world having assembled all this knowledge on the Internet for anyone to access, and the takeaway seems to be that the teacher reveals his value by saying “I don’t know a damn thing! I changed my mind three times since I walked in the room.”
I attended state college and recall no interesting back-and-forth in my classes. I’m sure that happened in more rarefied air.
But we were so so dumb after going through public K-12.
If the professor had announced, he or she was dumb, too, rather than trying to fill our heads with knowledge, it would’ve been awfully quiet in the classroom.
I had one tiny “seminar” class on a subject of so little interest to me I can barely remember it now: the philosophy of pedagogy? There was a packet of readings. Dewey was in there, that’s all I really remember. (Which Dewey?!) I never did the readings. Or at least I did start them pretty often, I did look them over - but I never got very far. I was always so sleepy.
I wonder if the other kids maybe did do the readings? Admirable. If they did, though, the result was not sparkling banter. I think perhaps it would’ve helped if we had been known to each other a little bit … I would interject something occasionally just because I liked the sound of my own voice. There was a kid who would write down the things I said. These things had no value. I just said them to be provoking. Like the professor would attempt to spark a discussion of the material, and I would say something like: the sole purpose of the university is the maintenance of its library.
The few teachers I remember, seemed very smart, or at least very smart on their subjects, and said things that held one’s interest.
I had one teacher, some sort of vaguely “psychology” class, but not exactly … oh, I remember he made us go downtown and try to visit with homeless people. That’s all I remember, I feel maybe I didn’t attend very much but it must’ve been some sort of intersection of psychiatry and (evil) Society business. Modernity and the Mad, or something. Anyway, this guy seemed to be somewhat in the school of that anti-psychiatry guy, Szasz? In the readings … Truly I sucked at picking classes, as I sucked at being a student - but in truth, it was sometimes kinda hard because there was this phone system that was difficult to use and you didn’t get your choices a lot of times. Also so much crap among the classes, circa 1990 … Anyway, this was a particularly pointless class, but the guy did like to pretend he was posing questions to us. Like Claude.
But it was fake. He wanted you to answer in a certain way so that he could correct you. (I guess in fairness, this is basically what Socrates did.) For instance, he asked us if we thought we could be on the street like that, homeless.
Uh, probably not, said a bunch of middle class kids.
Oh, but you can be, he said. If it wasn’t for your family, for your family having a bit of money, you would probably be out here. You are interchangeable with these people.
Okay.
The same song and dance semester after semester. What an incredible sinecure. He was at least 80 it seemed like. And he had rather than a teaching assistant, a secretary of many decades, a beautifully dressed lady assistant, also certainly in her 70s. She was always present and attended to everything clerical, and everything was clerical. She probably ran his household on the university dime. They were both affable, I’ll give them that.
"professors must reconceive of themselves as interlocutors, serving as performative models of how to calibrate uncertainty and revise frames in real time"
Has the person who wrote this sentence ever had an argument with an AI? I've had quite a few (philosophical) arguments with Claude that were more bi-directional and balanced than most of my disagreements with my (philosophy) professors in college. And Claude is getting better at things far more rapidly than college professors ever could. I agree that modeling good epistemological practice (which is inherently dialogical) should be a key part of professors' jobs, but it's also something the AIs will be superior at very soon.
“I agree that modeling good epistemological practice (which is inherently dialogical) should be a key part of professors' jobs, but it's also something the AIs will be superior at very soon.”
Better than the average professor soon? Perhaps.
Better than the top xx% of professors soon? No.
When And ifwill it be better than the top 1% of profs? I don’t know, and neither do you.
"rom roughly age 10 onward, anything that gets coded as a route to status and respect inside your kid’s actual social world becomes massively motivating, and anything that doesn’t gets tuned out."
Arnold, I think this is the heart of your Null Hypothesis for Education.
I think it is also close to the central thesis of Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."
It is also what drives the concern about "good schools" and housing prices; because, we actually do know the only way to improve outcomes for our kids: you have to move so that they are surrounded by better peers, and I do mean surrounded since you will definitely not be able to pick your kids friends for them. You need to be able to toss a dart and land on a well-adjusted child. Even then there is no guarantee, but it is definitely the highest leverage intervention.
“professors must reconceive of themselves as interlocutors, serving as performative models of how to calibrate uncertainty and revise frames in real time.“
Students: “Will any of this word salad or the related techniques be included as part of the midterms or finals?”
Professor: “No, I’m just signaling my status to my peer group with fancy jargon so that I can get invites to speak at conferences."
With that, the professor just lost about 99% of his students…
Even with my extraordinarily average IQ, I’m able to read between the lines from what the professor might actually say vs. his true meaning. Most students are able to easily glean this as well. In short, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to differentiate a snake oil salesman from a professor that actually cares about imparting useful knowledge.
I was a terrible college student, got kicked out for learning what I wanted from the library instead of the lectures I'd signed up for. But I do remember one professor in the first quarter, before I'd wised up and stopped going to lectures, who did his best to keep several hundred bored students awake. Econ 101, must have been. Supply and demand curves, I suppose. Points O for the origin, A, B, C, ... for the others. A soap company. "As you can see, as demand B-O rises ..." and a long pause until a few students realized he was waiting for a reaction. I should have paid more attention, since he did seem to actually care, but it was a college-mandated class keeping me away from the library, so I didn't care.
Does the AI itself have this obsession with “uncertainty” and does that bear any relation to the timing of its training, after relativism was taken to a comic degree in academia?
I’m not trying to be snarky. I’m very far away in space and time from college, and a little puzzled by the world having assembled all this knowledge on the Internet for anyone to access, and the takeaway seems to be that the teacher reveals his value by saying “I don’t know a damn thing! I changed my mind three times since I walked in the room.”
I attended state college and recall no interesting back-and-forth in my classes. I’m sure that happened in more rarefied air.
But we were so so dumb after going through public K-12.
If the professor had announced, he or she was dumb, too, rather than trying to fill our heads with knowledge, it would’ve been awfully quiet in the classroom.
I had one tiny “seminar” class on a subject of so little interest to me I can barely remember it now: the philosophy of pedagogy? There was a packet of readings. Dewey was in there, that’s all I really remember. (Which Dewey?!) I never did the readings. Or at least I did start them pretty often, I did look them over - but I never got very far. I was always so sleepy.
I wonder if the other kids maybe did do the readings? Admirable. If they did, though, the result was not sparkling banter. I think perhaps it would’ve helped if we had been known to each other a little bit … I would interject something occasionally just because I liked the sound of my own voice. There was a kid who would write down the things I said. These things had no value. I just said them to be provoking. Like the professor would attempt to spark a discussion of the material, and I would say something like: the sole purpose of the university is the maintenance of its library.
The few teachers I remember, seemed very smart, or at least very smart on their subjects, and said things that held one’s interest.
I had one teacher, some sort of vaguely “psychology” class, but not exactly … oh, I remember he made us go downtown and try to visit with homeless people. That’s all I remember, I feel maybe I didn’t attend very much but it must’ve been some sort of intersection of psychiatry and (evil) Society business. Modernity and the Mad, or something. Anyway, this guy seemed to be somewhat in the school of that anti-psychiatry guy, Szasz? In the readings … Truly I sucked at picking classes, as I sucked at being a student - but in truth, it was sometimes kinda hard because there was this phone system that was difficult to use and you didn’t get your choices a lot of times. Also so much crap among the classes, circa 1990 … Anyway, this was a particularly pointless class, but the guy did like to pretend he was posing questions to us. Like Claude.
But it was fake. He wanted you to answer in a certain way so that he could correct you. (I guess in fairness, this is basically what Socrates did.) For instance, he asked us if we thought we could be on the street like that, homeless.
Uh, probably not, said a bunch of middle class kids.
Oh, but you can be, he said. If it wasn’t for your family, for your family having a bit of money, you would probably be out here. You are interchangeable with these people.
Okay.
The same song and dance semester after semester. What an incredible sinecure. He was at least 80 it seemed like. And he had rather than a teaching assistant, a secretary of many decades, a beautifully dressed lady assistant, also certainly in her 70s. She was always present and attended to everything clerical, and everything was clerical. She probably ran his household on the university dime. They were both affable, I’ll give them that.
Oil money was so gullible always.
Which Dewey? Probably Admirable Dewey.
"professors must reconceive of themselves as interlocutors, serving as performative models of how to calibrate uncertainty and revise frames in real time"
Has the person who wrote this sentence ever had an argument with an AI? I've had quite a few (philosophical) arguments with Claude that were more bi-directional and balanced than most of my disagreements with my (philosophy) professors in college. And Claude is getting better at things far more rapidly than college professors ever could. I agree that modeling good epistemological practice (which is inherently dialogical) should be a key part of professors' jobs, but it's also something the AIs will be superior at very soon.
“I agree that modeling good epistemological practice (which is inherently dialogical) should be a key part of professors' jobs, but it's also something the AIs will be superior at very soon.”
Better than the average professor soon? Perhaps.
Better than the top xx% of professors soon? No.
When And ifwill it be better than the top 1% of profs? I don’t know, and neither do you.
Which mirrors AI’s capabilities on most fronts.
"rom roughly age 10 onward, anything that gets coded as a route to status and respect inside your kid’s actual social world becomes massively motivating, and anything that doesn’t gets tuned out."
Arnold, I think this is the heart of your Null Hypothesis for Education.
I think it is also close to the central thesis of Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids."
It is also what drives the concern about "good schools" and housing prices; because, we actually do know the only way to improve outcomes for our kids: you have to move so that they are surrounded by better peers, and I do mean surrounded since you will definitely not be able to pick your kids friends for them. You need to be able to toss a dart and land on a well-adjusted child. Even then there is no guarantee, but it is definitely the highest leverage intervention.
“professors must reconceive of themselves as interlocutors, serving as performative models of how to calibrate uncertainty and revise frames in real time.“
Students: “Will any of this word salad or the related techniques be included as part of the midterms or finals?”
Professor: “No, I’m just signaling my status to my peer group with fancy jargon so that I can get invites to speak at conferences."
With that, the professor just lost about 99% of his students…
No one in education would ever give an honest answer like that (whether it's true or not).
Even with my extraordinarily average IQ, I’m able to read between the lines from what the professor might actually say vs. his true meaning. Most students are able to easily glean this as well. In short, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to differentiate a snake oil salesman from a professor that actually cares about imparting useful knowledge.
I was a terrible college student, got kicked out for learning what I wanted from the library instead of the lectures I'd signed up for. But I do remember one professor in the first quarter, before I'd wised up and stopped going to lectures, who did his best to keep several hundred bored students awake. Econ 101, must have been. Supply and demand curves, I suppose. Points O for the origin, A, B, C, ... for the others. A soap company. "As you can see, as demand B-O rises ..." and a long pause until a few students realized he was waiting for a reaction. I should have paid more attention, since he did seem to actually care, but it was a college-mandated class keeping me away from the library, so I didn't care.