unlearning............................

 

. . . economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his class a take-home midterm, the way he had for years. The class average came back at 96% in a course where midterms historically averaged 65 to 80. Suspicious that the students were using AI, he made the final exam in-person. The average collapsed to 48.6%, the lowest he’d ever seen. Dozens of students had likely used AI on the midterm, and the final exam revealed how little they actually knew. These are Ivy League students holding the most powerful learning tool ever built, and instead of using it to learn, they used it to skip learning because thirteen years of school didn’t teach them how to learn, or even why it’s important.

-Austin Scholar, from this episode

hardness.................

 

     The intellectual as a champion of the masses is a relatively recent phenomenon.  Education does not naturally waken in us a concern for the uneducated.  The distinction conferred by education is more easily maintained by a sharp separation from those below than be a continued excellence of achievement.  When Gandhi was asked by an American clergyman what it was that worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated."

-Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

Aging..........................

 

...................................like a fine wine.

cultivating..........................

 

Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning — the confusion of instruction and education.  We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind.

-from this master cultivator

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

Learned something new today............

 

Uruguay had been established with the help of Britain as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil and formally declared independence in 1830.  The remainder of the nineteenth century was bloody as those of European descent first massacred the Indigenous peoples and then fell to a series of civil wars between the Blancos, the conservative champions of the rights of landowners, and the Colorados, the liberals based largely in Montevideo.  Although the Colorados won every election held between 1865 and 1958, it took a long time for that to equate to stability.  By 1900, Uruguay had suffered around fifty coups and uprisings.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

True, these..................

 

272.   One of my goals is to be an ambitious 85-year-old.

273:   Life is a series of continuing education classes.

-Michael Wade, Random Thoughts: Brief Reflections and Moments of Clarity

transmissions..............

 

     We have said that a great civilization does not entirely die—non omnis moritur.  Some precious achievements have survived all the vicissitudes of  rising and falling states: the making of fire and light, of the wheel and other basic tools; language, writing art, and song; agriculture, the family, and parental care; social organization, morality, and charity; and the use of teaching to transmit the lore of the family and race.  These are the elements of civilization, and they have been tenaciously maintained through the perilous passage from one civilization to the next.  They are the connective tissue of human history.

     If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing.  Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

It's simple..............................

 

Complexity is easier to sell but the more complex a financial plan or portfolio becomes, the harder it is for clients to stick with it. Simple strategies, when clearly defined and explained, work better in the long run.

But simple is harder than complex.

You have to fight to keep things simple because your natural tendencies make you susceptible to stories and narratives. Simplicity is more of a psychological exercise while complexity is more about trying to outsmart the competition.

Complex problems like the markets or financial plans don’t require complex solutions.

Charlie Munger once said, “Simplicity has a way of improving performance through enabling us to better understand what we are doing.”

-Ben Carlson, from this post

Seven learnings ......................................

.............from a week spent with legends: 

1. Intuition is earned.

2. You’re judged by your peaks, not your sums.

3. We need to look back more often.

 4. Most people don’t know what they want.

5. Stop doubling down on a losing hand.

6. Vulnerability is contagious (and breeds strength).

7. Maybe you can have it all.

-Sahil Bloom, extrapolated from this post

That vision thing........................

 Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance.  What we see does not cease to astonish us.  We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate.  Earth is not flat; it is not stationary.  The world continues to change before our eyes as we gradually see more extensively and more clearly.

-Carlo Rovelli,  Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

rating this mostly true............

 

And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

-as culled from this VDH post

On sorting out the future..................

 

In fact, many of its founding faculty were misfits in the most productive sense: outsiders in their own disciplines, a veritable Salon des Refusés. We weren’t solving problems. We were developing solutions without knowing the problems. That’s how breakthroughs happen, at the edges, where curiosity is free to wander and orthodoxy is politely ignored.

-Nicholas Negroponte, from this post

Avoiding dysfunction.............

 

“I love being treated like an adult” — such a sad low bar.

via

On cheering the spectacle.................

 

The Trump administration’s war on universities has been conducted with its signature Japanese-monster-movie approach, full of smashed infrastructure, rivers of screaming civilians, and battle scenes so spellbinding, questions of right and wrong go out the window. You can try to weigh the administration’s law-flouting (see below) against the universities’ appalling sense of entitlement, but I suspect many Americans will abandon sides and just cheer the spectacle of intractably self-regarding freaks joined in aerial combat over the Constitution. Harvard vs. the Trump-Monster should have been the next entry in the Shin Godzilla series, now it’s here.

-Matt Taibbi, from here

a mental gym...................

 At a time when many people are wondering about the value of a college education, those who are in charge of those institutions would be well advised to recognize that their business should be a mental gym; a place where minds and souls are strengthened.

-Michael Wade, as he opens this post 

Fifty some years ago, I spent a college semester at Denison University listening to Professor Robert Toplin in a class called Latin America: Evolution or Revolution.  We had two 2-hour classes per week.  In the first hour of each session Toplin would take the "right wing" point of view on some topic and argue it persuasively.  In the second hour of each session Toplin would take the "left wing" point of view on the same topic and argue it equally persuasively.  Being typical college students, we got confused.  We initially started out trying to figure out Toplin's true opinion, so we could feed it back to him on tests and papers.   Took us a while, but we finally discovered that he didn't care what we thought—just so long as we actually did the work of thinking.  Toplin taught me one of the most valuable life lessons available: how to think for myself.  I have been grateful for him ever since.

A most impressive resume...............

 

But, he described himself as a graduate of the New York City Public Library.

deep thoughts about deep thoughts.............

       I had come to grad school as a nontraditional student, older than my peers, leaving my job at a real estate development business to pursue a life of the mind.  I had failed as a student when I first went to college directly after high school, but when I returned in my twenties, I had a much different level of focus and commitment.  Unlike my first brush with higher education, I knew why I wanted to be there.

     When I reached my master's program, I took academia (and myself) very seriously.  I wrote dense essays about John Milton's Paradise Lost.  I attended conferences on pedagogy.  I thought deep thoughts about deep thoughts, and I was eager to tell you about them.  I used words like "epistemologies" before breakfast, without a hint of irony.

     My mental health struggles, my insomnia, and my fear of fully committing myself lest I prove my best wasn't enough meant I missed class fairly often, but I was still on the path to being respectable.  I was becoming a scholar.  A writer. A professor.  Somebody who left his small rustbelt town to do smart things with smart people.  I didn't have time for frivolous women and their frivolous art doodles.

     I was an idiot.

-Jarod K. Anderson

It's a process........................

 Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

On getting............................

 ...............................an "A" in life:

Realizing that education begins after graduation is a vital first step.