Pranav Gupta

Exploring #Collectivelntelligence: How to Design Technology-Augmented Distributed Teams, Organizations, and Communities

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@paraschopra Without them, we will lock ourselves INTO AN ENDLESS HUSTLE. Or worse, lock ourselves out of OUR OWN BEING/FULFILLMENT.

Suicidal ideation is only the extreme version of this. Many people live mental lives filled with dread and desperation! Symptom: Self-talk full of "shoulds"

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@paraschopra Proactively practicing basic mental hygiene will become necessary to lead a healthy life.

Do we understand "job/work as passion vs. work as identity" or "providing as success as a person vs. providing as a means of living" and a bunch of related stuff ...

[Sean McClure @sean_a_mcclure]

@QuanquanGu The next step is overhauling the publication system. Both paywalled and open versions like @arxiv refuse to publish independent research, allowing only institutional affiliation and credentialism to dictate the “quality” of science.

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@evanlapointe “Requisite solution quality” — requisite is both taste and intelligence.

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@evanlapointe I also get the tie breaker as an individual rational solution and reinforcement to produce clarity and alignment.

I would be curious to read your approach on how an expert systems thinker works through eliminating the irrationality of this duality (which I am assuming is —

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@evanlapointe I see this as a duality to be held and navigated (systems language = co-regulated).
Curious what you mean by solved? Is it for every project where we articulate an aligned expectation of result quality and speed? How does a top-leader go about it?

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

Big picture:

I think "kids should be learning at their actual level"is the most foundational belief I have about education. It doesn't serve kids to pass them on when they haven't mastered something or to make them tread water when they have.

I believe something like 'kids are naturally curious/it matters enormously what kids' innate interests and motivations are' while also believing that if you just do whatever is most intrinsically interesting in the moment, you'll sort of end up in an impoverished local maximum, and much of the point of adults is to offer the scaffolding to do hundreds of times better than that. You do want to take kids' interests extremely seriously and have, for each kid, a vision of what their education is supposed to offer them and which benefits are visible to them.

I am really strongly in favor of reading-heavy instruction. Our science and social studies curricula are both extremely book heavy; our American history/lit course assigned 17 books. Reading is a very efficient way to gain information, it's how most well-informed adults know most of the things that they know, there's content in books that I know of no other way to come by, and there are really excellent books on a huge range of topics. My biggest disagreement with Alpha is here. They deemphasize books to a degree that seems really tragic to me. I've written a bit about the TeachTales app they use, which I think is worse than good books for 99% of kids. If I were trying to do all academic instruction in 2 hours a day, 1 hour would be reading.

I ideally don't want kids to relate to learning as something they get out of the way in order to do interesting things, but something that enables all of the interesting things. That said I think it's just a fact that a lot of learning involves practicing something to mastery and this can be boring and it's fine if kids are doing this because they want the end result rather than out of an intrinsic love of times table practice.

I think AI changes everything and in particular will dramatically alter the world our children enter as adults, but I've been extremely cautious about using AI to teach. I'm much more in favor of using it to create and improve assignments than having kids use it. I worry a lot that tech-enabled learning, unless done well, trains extremely fast-reward styles of thinking and makes kids struggle to enjoy activities where the rewards are not delivered instantly. I'd love to try to build an analog, books-forward Alpha School (and kind of am trying to do this).

I think it's important to have a vision for transmission of your values. This doesn't mean school should be about indoctrination: one of our values is free debate and improvement through argument and questioning inherited wisdom! But you do have to articulate what you believe in to children, and I think it's important that articulation be compelling and morally serious. It's a bad thing if the richest, free-est societies in all of human history are raising children who are unaware of this fact about their society and cannot even articulate a defense of it.

[Mallesh Pai @malleshpai]

Hot take: important advances never require long papers.

If I was in charge (I'm not!!) here's how i'd restructure it:

1. every actual general interest paper is published "insight" style. make it so everyone (or at least a much larger set than the paper's subsubfield) can read and appreciate what the paper does (with details, not just fluff, but in brief/ the most important parts). if they can't, well, the paper isn't general interest anyway.

2. appendix A is the "methods appendix". this can be a bit longer, and is meant for the people in the field, or those curious, to understand more about the details.

3. appendix B is coauthored with the referees and contains all the nonsense "proof of work" stuff we do. ideally, this eventually disappears as we develop stigma around long appendix B's.

[Stuart Sims @SimsYStuart]

IQ isn’t dropping because of technology. IQ is dropping because of the criminally insane tech bro culture who are developing the technology. All the harm we see from technology is deliberate. But camouflaged as greed/incompetence etc. Choosing “profit over people.” But when it goes on this long and continues despite clear harm, at that point the harm must be treated as deliberate. And the people who continue this harm must be removed and punished.

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@attentionmech Mental habit. The same mechanism that makes your practiced physical movements/routines “effortless” i.e. unconscious to your intentional effort.

If it happens with physical movements, it can also happen with mental movements (thoughts and emotions).

[प्रणव @PranavaBhardwaj]

One of the best speeches ever given by an Indian on education system.

Delhi former Deputy Chief Minister @msisodia decodes the reason for low “Civic Sense” in us as a society.

Do hear.

[Amy Tam @amytam01]

https://t.co/b9f99xbcMx

[Neil Almond-Doherty @Mr_AlmondED]

🧵
One of the most devastating graphs around AI in education was published by the OECD recently that confirms what those interested in the SoL have known for some time.

🤯 Performance ≠ learning.

Here’s the 60 Second briefing 👇👇👇

1/5

[Pranav Gupta @pgupta_ci]

@sean_a_mcclure Any thesis on why that is so?
I’ve concluded the same recently but have not derived the mechanism.

Intuition gives insight, then like a mathematician, one spends time constructing method.

[prerat @prerat]

while my friends played starcraft, i studied the compiler. and now you come to me ...

wait hold on your saying niche computer knowledge is commoditized now and what matters is coordinating a bunch of agents with lots of quick task switching and high APM

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

When I first began training teachers on Socratic dialogue, I immediately saw that two-day or week-long workshops weren't enough. Without daily Socratic practice and skilled mentors, seminars slipped into aimless discussions. It has been my belief for decades that real classroom change demands culture change, not training or technology.

[Sean McClure @sean_a_mcclure]

Science has become a rather juvenile player in the league of deep thinking.

Its abandonment of anything philosophical leaves it with only dry toy models, that do little outside academic fascination.

Science offers mere caricatures of reality, dressing itself in causal language to appear more capable than it is.

It’s why youth are attracted to it more earnestly. It’s an easy story. It shows you the levers to pull. It gives one a sense of comforting control, despite a world with little in it. Why wrestle with the depth of profound thought when one can simply grab a symbol, a model, a statistical result.

Science has become the coloring book at the artist’s table. The crutch that alleviates any need for erudition, true insight, or the courage to mess oil on canvas. It shies away from meeting existence fully, instead playing at a safe distance with its sterile measurements and chalkboard theories.

Its most surviving mechanism is its convincing power. But it convinces not with logical foundation, rather it merely predicts back into its own toy mindset. It claims to be the reason for progress when in reality it is simply a post hoc narrative; a neat fairytale that takes credit for nature’s opaque engine.

Science is readily appropriated by agenda because its reductionist framing is so easily seized and remixed. It has no guard against political or propagandistic uses, the way deep logic and erudite rationality do.

Science is wholly unprepared to face the increasingly emergent reality of our modern world. Its cartoonish mechanisms offer little in the face of true complexity. Its claimed authorship of human progress is losing robustness and credibility.

As it should.

Paradigms shift. New approaches spring forth.

Time for something real.