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Tag: learning

  • What the University Is Now For

    The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the…

  • Claims about grade inflation

    Average grades continue to rise in the United States, raising the question of how grade inflation impacts students. And: The cumulative impact is economically significant: a teacher with one standard deviation higher average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of their students by $213,872 per year. Concerning. And absolutely happening, based…

  • The hardest questions you can ask AI while expecting a reasonable response

    Somewhere in the bowels of X, Sam Altman suggested asking an AI to provide the hardest question it could reasonably answer. Perplexity provides 1/ difficult questions it can answer reasonably well (given the availability of public information), and 2/ questions that are hard to answer. These are the questions it can reasonably answer based on…

  • Do Less.

    I’d been treating my brain like a hard drive: Transfer the file, and it’s there. But that’s not how it works at all, not even close. Learning is more like digestion. You don’t absorb more nutrition by eating faster. Past a certain rate, you just stop digesting, and the food you’re cramming in isn’t feeding…

  • The Crucial Difference Between Being Educated and Being Cultured

    “culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn” And: “To be a cultured person is to be a person with some kind of original philosophy… This implies a desire to focus such imaginative reason as we possess upon the mystery of life.“ And: “The more culture a…