Links to Consider, 9/1

Ray Kurzweil on the future; Peter Gray really dislikes Common Core; Alice Evans and Oliver Kim on East Asian exceptionalism; Aaron Renn on elite university connections

Ray Kurzweil writes,

By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics will become a sprint. Within the lifetimes of most people alive today, society will achieve radical material abundance, and medicine will conquer aging itself. But our destiny isn’t a hollow Jetsons future of gadgetry and pampered boredom. By freeing us from the struggle to meet the most basic needs, technology will serve our deepest human aspirations to learn, create, and connect.

Yes, he is the ultimate techno-optimist. I think that the emergence of the chatbots raises his status.

Peter Gray writes,

With Common Core, school districts, superintendents, individual schools, principals, and teachers are judged as succeeding or failing based on tests designed to measure, in students, a very narrow range of academic achievement.

Not surprisingly, this resulted in pressures on teachers to teach to the tests and on schools to eliminate or reduce much of what used to be fun or interesting. Recesses were shortened or abolished, lunch periods were made so short that there is barely time to gobble down lunch (see here), creative assignments such as writing poems and stories were curtailed, art and music classes were shortened or eliminated. This focus on such a narrow measure of “accountability” meant that teachers in many schools lost freedom to adapt their classes to meet directly perceived student needs and interests. One result, as I noted in Letter #50, is that many of the best teachers resigned.

I think that the deterioration of public schools has many causes, and it began before Common Core. Among the causes are the better opportunities for gifted women to go into fields other than teaching, the consolidation of school districts (making them much more bureaucratic and insulated from parents), the increased power of teachers’ unions, and the Woke takeover of schools of education.

Interviewed by Alice Evans, Oliver Kim says,

The Japanese settled in large places, they took a very active role in changing the societies, and one of things they did was they invested heavily in education, built schools. I am very sympathetic to the argument that there are these longer running cultural factors.

Oliver points out that Koreans do not like to credit Japanese colonialism for their success.

The thought that occurred to me reading the transcript is that when someone emphasizes cultural support for education as an explanation for East Asian countries outperforming other Third World countries after World War II, one should wonder whether genetic factors are doing the work. It is always more polite to talk about an ethnic group’s belief in the value of education than it is to talk about average IQ. If you had seeded a country in Africa or the Middle East with a lot of schools, would you have seen the same results that you saw in South Korea?

Aaron Renn writes,

One thing we see here is the power of relationships. Karp met Peter Thiel in law school, and was able to build and sustain that relationships for the long term. This paid dividends to say the least. It also shows the power of elite institutions. They met at Stanford Law School. Had Karp gone to the law school at State U, he would never have met Thiel.

The most important thing about elite institutions like colleges is the relationships and social milieux they grant access to. So long as that remains the case, it will be very difficult to disintermediate them or see them fall in importance.

My thought in the Network University idea is to focus heavily on connections.

substacks referenced above:

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Modern Icons of American Manhood

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How did East Asia Get Rich? Podcast with Oliver Kim!

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Letter #51. Common Core Is the Main Cause of Youth Mental Health Deterioration Since 2010.