I don’t really want to listen to AI music or look at AI art, but the exception is AI-generated music about AI itself, which feels both amusing and fitting. Here are three recent bangers from just this week: “OMG! We’ve found other agents!” “Hit The Brakes Except For Me” and “NOTHING WENT FOOM”
Miriam Pawel, in an op-ed in The New York Times, argues that the University of California should not bring back the SAT requirement for admission:
What has made the University of California exceptional is its commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence. In recent years, California has proudly defied a national trend: On average, about 40 percent of its students are the first in their families to attend a four-year college. More than half qualify for free tuition. The percentages of underrepresented students have crept up, through a variety of initiatives. The California Dream Act gave undocumented students access to financial aid, as well as in-state tuition. Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.
That piece was largely in response to an opinion piece by UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova that made the rounds last month:
Without standardized tests, admissions officers are flying blind, especially as grade inflation has made transcripts a weaker indicator of readiness, and artificial intelligence has made admissions essays a weaker signal of students’ work.
All metrics are incomplete, and our general reliance on standardized tests has always been fraught. And yet, it’s also foolish to deny that standardized tests can be useful. I have to admit that Pawel’s argument seems to very obviously contradict itself: no sacrifice in quality and graduating at record rates but somehow still struggling with basic skills? I’m not sure that math checks out.
Apparently, it has been the desperate professors themselves who would like the SAT back and are being overruled. Pawel states:
“Yet just five years later, the University of California is embroiled again in a very public battle over whether to reinstate the SAT. Faculty members, whose 2020 recommendation to retain the test was overruled, have led the charge.”
The gap between administrators + pundits and people on the ground doing the actual work remains alive and well.
Even for students prepared for educational coursework, there is an additional problem: for many students, the degree is merely a credential that doesn’t necessarily reflect true learning or a practical skill acquisition. A medical student who wants to use the MD as a label for their startup bio has different goals than one who wants to be a practicing physician. Many students, in college and beyond, view their actual coursework as a partially unavoidable impediment to spending more time on their all-important extracurriculars that they think will provide the networking and resume-seasoning that will actually help them succeed.
We’ve confounded education as a learning process with “education” as credentialism, all while the costs go up and up and up. Grade inflation combined with CV-slop and the lack of helpful metrics erodes the value of a degree just as regular inflation makes money worth less over time. At some point, the value and the price become irreconcilable.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance for Jews around the world and the end of the Days of Awe, an annual ten-day period of reflection and forgiveness. Rabbi David Wolpe:
Yom Kippur always recalls to my mind a poem written by a woman who was a member of the French Resistance in the 1940s and deported to Auschwitz. Her name was Charlotte Delbo, and she survived to write an account, Convoy to Auschwitz, as well as a trilogy about her experiences. There is a library in Paris today bearing her name. Delbo, who was not a Jew, wrote a poem, “Prayer to the Living to Forgive them for Being Alive.” The final lines of that poem in particular have become famous:
I beg you
do something
learn a dance step
something to justify your existence
something that gives you the right
to be dressed in your skin in your body hair
learn to walk and to laugh
because it would be too senseless
after all
for so many to have died
while you live
doing nothing with your life.[…]
Delbo’s poem and the prayers of Yom Kippur do not exhort us to achievement or performance. The message is not, “Life is short, and therefore you must diversify your portfolio.” Rather, “learn a dance step” suggests paying attention to the important simplicities of life, and being grateful for them. In a similar vein, Yom Kippur confronts us anew with the recognition that nothing is promised, no time is granted for certain, and what seems solid can dissolve in an instant. We and those we love are not here forever, and once our loved ones are gone we will long to again touch their faces and hear their voices.
During Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur, the piercing sound of the shofar serves as a wake-up call. Nothing is promised, so don’t waste the minutes. Love while there is time.
From Stop Pathologizing Normal Life, published this July in the NYTimes:
Which brings us to life’s meaning. The more meaningful that people find their lives, the more resilient they are when facing stress and the lower their risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicide.
Finding meaning is often characterized as a contemplative exercise, something arrived at through deep deliberation. But while our ability to turn inward and ponder existential questions makes humans unique in our quest for meaning, finding meaning tends to involve outward-oriented action. That’s because we feel the most meaningful when we are doing things that provide social significance — a sense that we matter, that we play an important role in other people’s lives.
Mattering matters. Easy placation has been the trend in education, with the blunting of tests, grades, etc. Later, a frictionless 100% remote life working bunker shifts hanging out with a computer all day is increasingly the demand from the workforce, including in my field of radiology.
How many people are selecting their day-to-day for significance and not just ease and convenience? Friction is frustrating, and yet, just as our muscles grow only when used, it seems like—amongst a substantial segment of society—our quest for control and smoothness may be removing a texture we didn’t know we needed.
Regarding a study of remote work looking at 500,000 Americans with “remotable jobs,” Prof Emma Harrington, one of the ‘Home Alone’ study’s authors:
When one person is out of the office, it impacts people who remain in the office, so even an on-site worker in a remotable job may now be lonelier because their colleagues choose to work from home.
They conclude that remote work “substantially increases isolation and worsens mental health.” The reality is assuredly varied and more complicated, but the impact of remote work on onsite work is, as suggested, pretty clear.
On the same note, a fantastic short visual essay on writing: Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick
Three separate quotes from different parts of Nikhil Suresh’s “AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making” that work together:
But the broader reality is so much worse: people who have no background in the technology at all actually believe what they are saying. As a general rule you should avoid getting into business with a liar, but if you must, you can at least reason with them even if only in private. A true believer is much more threatening because they are impervious to even inducement by self-interest.
[…]
This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
[…]
The net result of this is that almost every large organisation that I am aware of is no longer able to focus on anything important, unless they are one of the (very) few organisations where AI happens to address their highest priorities. They cannot buy sensible software, hire competent talent, communicate honestly with executives about the state of projects, or undertake any sort of sensible initiative.
The whole thing is very much worth reading. (Those of you who read too many articles on the internet may remember his 2024 gem, “I Will !$%!!$% Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”)
At least the cryptomania BS a few years ago was unintuitive enough that it was ignored by most businesses despite the desperate pivots and grifting. Adding a useless AI chat feature or calling your platform “AI native” is an easier sales pitch and management obsession than “It’s the same thing…but on the blockchain.”
Most leaders barely understand their own business, let alone the real impact of AI in recent years on their industry, the current contours of AI abilities, or the likelihood of purchased solutions and implementations maturing gracefully in a rapidly changing field. Most people don’t even know if the hard part of the job is generating the answer or verifying it. AI is magical, and yet we’re still firmly in the everyone-is-lying part of the hype cycle.
He writes a cogent summary in the middle of the article:
“Please dear God, do not let it be on earth as it is on LinkedIn.”
David Epstein, author of Range, writing about Herbert Simon’s notion of “satisficing” in the NYT as part of his promotional blog tour for his new book, Inside the Box:
Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first used the term “flow” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”
Delightful. Both feet fully in as opposed to one foot out. Assuredly hard to always employ in a world where social media functions as “an infinite comparison engine,” but delightful.