Ray Girn

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

***The Coming Golden Age of Pedagogy***

An essay on the relationship between ed tech and pedagogy.

Thesis: the promise of ed tech, to be realized, is wholly dependent on the understanding and adoption of a fresh pedagogical framework.
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[Ray Girn @raygirn]

School closures tops my list.

What I wrote in 2020 has turned out to be true: “A generation of students is being subjected to intellectual privation, communal isolation, and in many cases mental harm — the impact of which will be felt for decades — on the basis of the guidance of people who are not intellectually serious about assessing the trade-offs. After the dust settles and only the facts remain, the tragic reality is that no one will be held responsible. When the devastation that has been wrought becomes apparent, and when we see that children, and particularly the children that most need us to be our best and most thoughtful, have been sacrificed on the altar of poorly-reasoned caution and partisanship, there will be no acknowledgement, no confessions or apologies, no mea culpas. Those who are now advocating total shutdown of schools irrespective of consequence, will move on to some other cause.”

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

I share my thoughts on the why all of us, including fierce critics of the conventional educational system, should unequivocally oppose school closures.

https://t.co/IxLOcD3CUL

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

“No sound of joy or sorrow
    Was heard from either bank;
But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
With parted lips and straining eyes,
    Stood gazing where he sank;
And when above the surges
    They saw his crest appear,
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
And even the ranks of Tuscany
    Could scarce forbear to cheer.

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

“No sound of joy or sorrow
    Was heard from either bank;
But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
With parted lips and straining eyes,
    Stood gazing where he sank;
And when above the surges
    They saw his crest appear,
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
And even the ranks of Tuscany
    Could scarce forbear to cheer.

[Matt Bateman @mbateman]

The main problem with classical education, which purports to onboard children to civilization, is the failure to understand that this is civilization

[David Harsanyi @davidharsanyi]

No one is in charge. That's why they're cheap.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Can’t stop thinking about the Orwell line from 1984

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.“

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

“Oh ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”
—Thomas Paine

250 years ago today, Thomas Paine challenged Americans to oppose not just unjust policies, but the tyrant himself.

Today, the danger often runs the other way. Many are eager to oppose one tyrant or regime in the name of another, one strongman for another, one party for another, but do not defend the principle of freedom.

It is those who dare oppose not only the tyrant, but the tyranny itself, in all its forms, who need to stand forth now.

[Matt Bateman @mbateman]

Great (and flattering) write up of my talk on normalcy in childhood, and a tactical application of it to teens, from @AustinScholar.

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

We guard against the impulse to cynicism.

Sometimes our heroes disappoint, sometimes systems fail to prevent fraud, sometimes extremely unlikely things happen or absurd conspiracy theories turn out to be true.

We have to remind ourselves that honest, active, sustained human judgment is self-correcting and can be trusted in principe and over time.

And we have to keep loving our heroes even if we have to stop loving a particular one of them.

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

“We wish the old things because we cannot understand the new, and we are always seeking after that gorgeousness which belongs to things already on the decline, without recognising in the humble simplicity of new ideas the germ which shall develop in the future.” -Maria Montessori

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

@CroesusApprent1 @Prigoose @CyndurX @elbasti @mbateman I think you’re projecting that it always goes back to money.

More money is wonderful and can be absolutely legitimate as a goal, but wanting “more and more money” is not the reason people seek purpose and demonstrate moral ambition.

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

There are good reasons why one might fear large scale data collection. In a world of public-private “partnerships”, anything enabling Big Brother government surveillance is a threat to freedom.

But it’s also true that, as this post below explains, “our civilization routinely hoards and treasures some of the silliest data in the world "i pressed like on the john pork reel" & destroys much of all the most important data it generates and limits what machines can learn”.

We don’t fear enough the risk of losing someone I love to some otherwise preventable disease because we are so afraid of data collection.

[roon @tszzl]

companies like Facebook record every imaginable interaction their users have with the platform. they log each of your clicks and taps. they keep track of how long your gaze lingered on a post, whether you were on the same WiFi as that woman who might be your friend, which instagram reel you watched three times.

for a single user this is quaint, but these practices are done on a planetary scale across all technology giants. they create petabytes of data per day and keep it for as long as the European regulators will let them. then they can have machine intelligence instrument it into useful knowledge for their cybernetic control systems that build newsfeeds, serve ads, decide how much compute to spend on you, which SKUs should be in which warehouses right before you want them. the Hive metastore bills run into the billions

hospitals throw most of their data and telemetry out after each case, every single day. they record videos of vascular surgeries, endoscopies, discovering interesting physiologies. sometimes they're not recorded at all and most of them the time they delete them as soon as they’re done

it's even worse for physiologic waveforms (ECG, EEG, arterial lines) which are essentially never recorded anywhere at all. milisecond scale views of patient's brains, vasculatures, hearts are generated and instantly destroyed. all of these time series of course predict people's hearts stopping, brains exploding, etc ahead of time. surgeons teleoperate robots, none of the micro-movements are recorded, policies never learned, never correlated into which outcomes were successful or not

this would be unthinkable to most software people whose instinct is to record everything everywhere never mind the cloud costs, because we are sure there will be some use for it later and some model to be trained later. i don't have a prescription here per se my point is just that our civilization routinely hoards and treasures some of the silliest data in the world "i pressed like on the john pork reel" & destroys much of all the most important data it generates and limits what machines can learn

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

@Prigoose @CyndurX @CroesusApprent1 @elbasti @mbateman Another way to put this point is that life is a process, an activity. It’s something you do or not do, rather than something you have.

[Made In Canada @MadelnCanada]

How a Canadian is born 🏒🇨🇦

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

The value of family life is not well understood. The only alternatives are marriage-as-duty vs. no marriage, kids-as-duty vs. no kids, family-as-a-check against and dampening of too much personal ambition vs. no family.

In fact, families are the social technology of individualism.

[Maia @maiamindel]

I don't think the modern GDP per capita of Southern Italy is caused by the immigration policies of the Roman Empire

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

@bloodthrstbooks The Secret Zoo is great, especially for your daughter’s age.

Significant more mature and challenging themes, so wait a few years, but His Dark Materials series is distinctively good.

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

A good history education helps children understand that there is human effort behind every comfort, every tool, every discovery, every advancement. This knowledge creates a deep and abiding gratitude for human achievement.

Essay:
https://t.co/cPxxW51tEm

[Ray Girn @raygirn]

@aquinasheard23 No but very eager to learn.

I read this by Frierson last year and found it interesting.