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In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had conducted a survey of freshmen to identify ones who were struggling –| Second Breakfast
No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped. It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion that "AI" is a con. They stamp their feet| Second Breakfast
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Math teacher Michael Pershan wrote an excellent newsletter this week, and I'd like to start there rather than with the ubiquitous stories about the underwhelming roll-out of OpenAI's latest GPT. Michael's insights are interesting and important; OpenAI, not so much – unless you want| Second Breakfast
Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business goals. "The procedure for bringing about a more businesslike organization and operation of the schools| Second Breakfast
Simon Ramo published his essay "A New Technique in Education" in 1957 in Engineering and Science, a journal published by Caltech to showcase the institution's research. "A noted scientist proposes some radical changes in our educational system to&| Second Breakfast
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Sometimes you have to repeat yourself. Sometimes you didn't say things clearly the first time. Sometimes your intended audience didn't hear you or they didn't listen. Sometimes there were louder voices, different messages that drowned yours out. Sometimes you need a do-over. Sometimes you| Second Breakfast
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Although I linked to it in Friday's newsletter and even embedded the Instagram clip, I have not been able to stop thinking about Ocean Vuong's remarks on how social media has shaping students' thoughts about "effort." Vuong says that, Our students… are| Second Breakfast
Over a decade ago, at the height of the MOOC madness, many people crowed excitedly about "the end of college" – not because the various technologies they believed would enable this were any good (by "good" I mean either "pedagogically sound" or "at| Second Breakfast
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There's been plenty of ink spilled in the last week in response to The New York Times's story on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college application to Columbia University, in which he ticked both the boxes for "Asian" and "Black or African American" when asked to identify his| Second Breakfast
Several weeks ago, a commenter suggested the word "howlround" to describe the dangerous tendency of LLMs to "glaze" their users – to provide responses that are self-reinforcing in both substance and style, that are overly agreeable ideologically and psychologically. A "howlround" is what one hears from LLMs – not some pure or| Second Breakfast
While I was pleased to see millions of Americans turn out for last weekend's protests, I have to say I've spent this week more depressed and more worried than ever about the road ahead. Perhaps it was the arrest of NYC Comptroller Brad Lander – the latest in a series of| Second Breakfast
"This is not right. This is not right." @justsayuhatebasketball I know this is a basketball page but I can’t think about hoops 🏀 right now. 🚨PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT🚨 PROTECT YOURSELVES AND YOUR FAMILIES AT ALL COSTS. THEY (ICE) ARE TRYING TO REACH THEIR QUOTA OF 3000 PEOPLE PER MONTH AND| Second Breakfast
In 2012, in a Wired article on "The Stanford Education Experiment [that] Could Change Higher Education Forever," Sebastian Thrun – then still a Stanford professor and a Google engineer – pronounced that, in fifty years time, there would only be ten universities left in the world and that his online education company| Second Breakfast
"'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This| Second Breakfast
How shall we ever conceive However express a new idea If we are bound by the categorization That delivered our problem to us In the first place ? -- Stafford Beer How do you measure intelligence? You take a tape measure, wrap it around someone's cranium, and jot down the number| Second Breakfast
Yesterday marked my fifth Mother's Day without him. Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of his passing. My beautiful boy, for whom I still grieve and will grieve every day forever; and despite his death, why I still fight. When I was a sophomore in college (about a year before I| Second Breakfast
I'm not sure if we can call it an official launch – there's no actual product yet – but a new education company Matter and Space unveiled its website last week. The company, co-founded by former SNHU president Paul LeBlanc, MOOC pioneer George Siemens, and clinical psychologist Tanya Gamby, promises "a revolutionary| Second Breakfast
The Secretary of Education Linda McMahon will speak at the ASU+GSV Summit next month. The conference makes no mention in its blurb promoting the Secretary's appearance of what happened last week: President Trump's executive order to dismantle her department. There's no mention of any of the other actions that| Second Breakfast
This will be the last Friday you'll receive a Second Breakfast newsletter in 2024. I'm not writing my usual "year-in-review" series either, as easy as it could have been to just copy-and-paste "artificial intelligence" a thousand times over and call it good. Paid subscribers will continue to hear from me| Second Breakfast
Tressie McMillan Cottom delivered an excellent "mini lecture" on TikTok this week about AI, politics, and inequality. In it, she draws on Daniel Greene's book The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope: his idea of the "access doctrine" that posits that in a time of| Second Breakfast
Welcome to part 3 of my look at heart rate monitors — the history, the practices, the science, and the marketing of this aspect of fitness tracking. I decided to see a physical therapist last week as, a week after my "fall," I was still in pain. I wanted to make| Second Breakfast
I walk a lot. I mean, I'm a New Yorker now, and here we walk significantly more than other Americans elsewhere do (which isn't necessarily saying much as Americans in general walk very little -- far far less than the residents in other industrialized countries). Poppy and I walk Kin| Second Breakfast
Happy Friday! What’s good? My training, I will say, has been very good lately; I’m balancing the preparations for my spring half marathon with my powerlifting — something that, in the past, I’ve found quite hard to do. When I ramp up the running, my ability to add| Second Breakfast
Nikki slid the heart rate monitor onto my arm and fastened it around my bicep, then handed me a laminated piece of paper with a large, colorful bar graph. "During your workout," she said, "the monitor is going to tell you which 'zone' you're in." She pointed to the handout.| Second Breakfast
