Entropy 💎🐲

It's the dino nuggets thing again, a shade of the true self reflecting in the false self. If you teach people to write passionless papers about shit they don't care about, then the shit they don't care about is going to be what the machine eats, and then naturally if the machine eats a bunch of bland ass writing, people see what the machine makes from that and think well surely anything like this must be from the machine

The system made itself, i guess, is what I'm getting at, and maybe we should get people to try to write things they give a shit about more than just things to earn twenty points on

i have been quietly freaking out about this since not long after i graduated high school and realized that my teachers had adultified me in some cases through my public education at a similarly resourced city as your tale.

i was drafted as an underage ta and given way too much opinion about my peers by my teachers, and it sucked but also it was the least bad option for everybody? my teachers were overworked and didnt have time to deal with my adhd ass, my peers often didnt have other chances to learn, and helping people learn was an early special interest of mine and i was good at it before the world beat the patience out of me. in retrospect, i was on occasion discussing what was essentially covert remedial education for my peers so that the ghouls from the district didnt come in and make things worse, with adults, from when i was 12.

i truly think this is going to be a factor in the next wave of the internet being even more of a collective subconscious perma storm cell as the general ability of the population to both read and write degrades while ability to post (vis smart phone adoption rates) continues to increase. i have basically resolved to do Offline At Any Cost about it. this just isnt a fight i can fight on this ground. making the internet a place instead of a tool was a dangerous choice, and i just gotta change that for myself to keep going

i will say from being proximate to a math heavy science, that remediation is one of the biggest uncompensated burdens facing college teachers.

feynman's famous intro to physics series reflected a huge increase in the mathematical sophistication of incoming college students by the 1960s, and i'm not sure colleges have ever really shifted away from that assumption.

some state schools, especially those that are committed to admitting all applicants, have to face this more head on, but no one really wants to fund it.

This goes back at least to when I was in school, where the actual education was always supposed to have happened "upstream," with the public schools saying "look, man, we're funded through property taxes, need to march through a minefield where any topic could be an attack on some parent's fake version of Christianity, and most parents just think of us as a gigantic daycare center!"

I went to an engineering college, so the focus on different subjects doesn't match the rest of the world, but I have two data points from...I dunno, a billion years ago?

First, as an engineering school, everyone assumed that no student would have any aptitude for or interest in the humanities. The curriculum had as little of it as the accreditation boards would let them get away with.

But more tellingly, the placement exam involved writing - if I remember correctly - one half-page essay on any one of six topics, with a two-and-a-half-hour time limit. When the professor told me that, I laughed in derision, and they immediately gave me more time, and assumed that I gave up when I walked out of the room in twenty minutes.

Second, by contrast to English, they (of course) did care about math. And in the years that I attended, the math department added three remedial courses, because students kept failing the other remedial courses. I forget what they called them in the catalogs, but internally, they referred to "pre-pre-pre-Calculus." We had students who aspired to designing bridges and jets and stuff, who tried to "when will we ever need to use this in the real world" factoring polynomials, and could/would only do it with a memorizable-and-forgettable system.

In other words, yes, what professors blame on "AI" actually reflects uninspired essay questions and students trained to put forth the least-effort, most-formulaic responses that they can get manage, because that got them through every important class in the past and nobody ever asked them to specify their thesis.

hey, I'm with you on most of this, but the US unemployment is not high. it's actually historically low, and has been for some time.