Josh Pitts

credo ut intelligam | resurgam

[Ellen Carmichael @ellencarmichael]

Probably a good time to re-up my piece on why Huey P. Long was a criminal, evil wretch who left his state lagging behind its neighbors - even a century later. Seriously doubt the judgment of anyone who finds anything to admire in this scum.

https://t.co/i4J5r0WNxo

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Some people have all the luck.

Why can't I have more data centers in MY community? I like facing lower taxes and having a better-funded police department.

[Susan Wise Bauer @SusanWiseBauer]

Put aside the "how will schools and universities cope with AI?" for a minute, and think about our brains.

I still remember a pivotal class in graduate school: I was doing an M.A. in literature, but I took an elective seminar in linguistics. That class was the hardest I'd worked (possibly, then or since). I had to line up four different schools of linguistic theory and explain what they had in common, and how they were different.

As this was in the Dark Ages, I had to do this without outside help.

I made a chart. I hand-wrote everything that I knew of each school on that chart. I lined up each element of each school side by side. I wrote painstaking paragraphs about each element. I assembled them into an essay.

By the end of it that essay, I *understood* what I was doing. I knew what those linguistic schools were about. More than that, I had learned how to take a set of conflicting, complicated ideas and put them into my own framework.

(And the professor wrote, at the top of the essay, that it was the best one on the subject he'd ever seen. These things matter.)

I've often said that wrestling with a difficult set of ideas and finding understanding is, for me, like the moment when (to use a farm metaphor) you back up the truck with a bumper ball hitch, lower the trailer coupler over it, and feel the sweet moment when the coupler snaps into place. It's a sweet, satifisfying visceral connection. (Maybe some of you can offer a less trailer-based metaphor; I do this a couple of times a week, so that's what comes to mind for me.)

Now, I could ask AI to produce that chart for me. It would be a great chart. It just wouldn't do the same work for my brain.

This week's NYTimes opinion column had an excellent take on this situation.

**

Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else — as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest.
Very few people would volunteer to dig a ditch. Likewise, it is hard — almost impossible, many English teachers will admit — to turn a reluctant writer into an enthusiastic one.

Yet the American education system expects nearly all students to learn how to write an essay. It’s little wonder, then, that as soon as a tool arrived promising to lessen the pain people grabbed it.

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is now firmly embedded in how students produce text. Somewhere between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are already using A.I. for schoolwork, according to recent surveys, often requesting help with writing assignments.

A growing number of educators are alarmed, and insist that students should write without A.I. These teachers are returning to handwriting, blue books and proctored, in-class essay tests — all attempts to prevent students from outsourcing their writing to chatbots.

This is baffling to tech industry leaders, who see A.I. rejection as a form of educational malpractice. They point out that writing is already the leading use of A.I. in the workplace, and argue there is no need to continue suffering through the task without help. After all, they say, chatbots now exceed the ability of most human beings to produce fluent prose.

All this points to some questions about writing itself: Why work so hard to learn it? And what do students stand to lose when they stop facing down a blank page, alone with their thoughts?

...Research shows that traditional, unassisted composition is valuable, not despite its difficulty, but because of it. Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood...

[T]here is no part of the writing process that can be handed over to A.I. without some cost. Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything — whether it’s “The Crucible” or A.I. itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?

**
Those who want to do the hard work of thinking will write.

Those who don't will cheat.

I'm guessing that there will be an early advantage for the cheaters, and a longer-term advantage for the thinkers. It's possible that our task as responsible parents and pre-AI thinkers is to hold onto some semblance of culture while those advantages shake themselves out.

https://t.co/SRQkBDik0j

[Josh Pitts @Josh_Pitts]

Finished Jerry Bridges “True Community” - a good reminder of how the church body is supposed to function

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

We "got into" it because Congress shirked its responsibility to reclaim from a lawless president its constitutional authority to decide whether to initiate war. Johnson and the other sycophants and cowards among congressional Republicans bear responsibility for this disaster.

[Darren Jansen @DarrenTJansen]

Wut

[Michael Sobolik @michaelsobolik]

Xi Jinping has already internalized the logic Trump lays out in this post: convince Trump that you’re “unthreatening and respectful,” and he’ll offer unilateral concessions and blame America’s partners for being “hostile.”

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

Being classy has very little to do with money or status. It has everything to do with how you conduct yourself.

How many of these do you avoid? https://t.co/T94MD1gx8i

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

How intelligence changes with age.

-Blue: General intelligence
-Green: Crystallized intelligence (acquired knowledge and skills)
-Red: Fluid intelligence (processing speed and ability to deal with novel problems)

https://t.co/yb32wBPDPd

[Jeff Stein @jstein_notus]

Just so people are really aware of what this means: A Trump appointee has approved Trump’s personal crypto firm to operate as a bank

Corporations can conduct transactions in which the Trump family gets a cut

The public will not have to be informed

There’s no precedent for this

[Gummi @gummibear737]

Hypocrisy aside, this should scare the heck out of all Americans because there is no upside to the USD losing its position as global reserve currency…it would be a disaster for the US

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

And some people who once claimed (idiotically) that they’d rather have 40 ideologically reliable true believer conservative senators than a 60 seat Republican majority, turn out to not be true believers at all, but hacks willing to call the true believers “deranged” if it grants them the slightest relevance or profit.

[Matt Franck @MatthewJFranck]

The most interesting piece I've seen yet on Nolan's Odyssey is this one by @beatrixscudeler @PublicDiscourse — https://t.co/qVcR3XfuRZ

[Anna Lulis @annamlulis]

This is what a 34 week old baby looks like outside the womb.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey just legalized killing an unborn child at this age. For no reason, just because someone wants to

They call it “reproductive rights” because they refuse to call it what it is: murder

[i/o @avidseries]

Bill Barr on Donald Trump: "If you believe in [Trump's] policies, he's the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them. He does not have the discipline, he does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking... It is a horror show when he's left to his own devices. And, and so, you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies. He will deliver chaos and, if anything, lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be."

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

The United States is running out of missiles

The Pentagon is worried about protecting assets in the Middle East and around the world. Trump lashed out at officials about the depletion

And the shortage may force the U.S. to settle for a bad Iran deal https://t.co/lA55QaZDhl

[Alex Hollings @AlexHollings52]

Doing a deep dive into the Virginia class, and the more I read about stuffing a 30 megawatt nuclear reactor into a metal tube packed with 140 people that’s underwater for 90 days at a time, the more annoyed I get at the nuclear power naysayers here on land.

[Russ Greene @GreenPlusAnE]

Here's the 1996 Social Security Trustee report, projecting that the trust fund will run out in 2031.

30 years later, the trust fund is projected to run out in 2032.

This is 100% seniors' fault. They knew the whole time.

[Edward Feser @FeserEdward]

After our naked emperor is gone, the line of sycophants suddenly eager to reveal “what I really thought all along” will be very long. Their accounts will be illuminating and useful to historians, but it will be too late to undo the damage they’ll have done to their reputations.

[Obsidian Ex-Arminian @BlackCalvinist]

This gladdens my heart.
https://t.co/Kctw5FgSLw