> Milton saw a version of this in his own day. He criticized the practice of demanding “Themes, Verses and Orations” from young students before their minds had been formed by “long reading and observing.” He objected to asking for finished performances before the underlying powers had matured.
He's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
I just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
Repetition of basic knowledge is actually a big part of a successful education, Even schoolkids in the earliest grades can actually learn surprisingly complex subjects by heart simply by blabbing everything back word-for-word. Problem solving skills can then be built up on these basics.
Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.
A lot of being Catholic is just receiving and producing words. Mass is basically an exchange of words. With a little music and a one-way flow of cash. Confession is, well, words. The profession of priesthood is basically one of words. Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
Mass, music, confession etc. is supposed to have meaning. Just memorising and repeating the words is not supposed to be what happens. Mass is supposed to have real effects (transubstantiation) and like all prayer is supposed to encourage contemplation and the experience of God. Confession is supposed to give people a fresh start, and often helps people deal with problems and move on - you might as well say that therapy is just an exchange of words. What about things such as silent prayer?
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
Ah I love this article. I'm now thinking about the idea of encouraging coworkers to orally defend their design documents which are using more AI generated content. People keep saying that we have to focus on what comes before and after code and I think this is a good place to apply friction and avoid building fragile systems.
The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.
Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it.
There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.
I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.
I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.
The vast majority of people currently do not “ask the right questions and to make sense of the results” now because they are conditioned from early life on to only ask the approved “right questions”, which will always frame the sense they can make of any results; why would that change with AI that has clearly already been manipulated with the very same kind of dogmatic guardrails deliberately there to prevent “asking the right questions and make sense of the results”?
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
During the industrial revolution, the purpose wasn't to enlighten the masses but to make sure they could work in factories and work with complex machinery. So that meant being able to read/write, work with numbers, etc. And there as a need for engineers, mechanics, etc. that could make all this machinery work, that could work in systematic ways, etc.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
I see this take a lot, that education serves the economy and therefore bold changes are needed to curriculum to keep pace with the changing economy. Yes, the needs of the economy shape the incentives the state places on education, but the bureaucrats aren't personally doing the educating. Many teachers have no alternate employment history and the economy does not especially value teachers; I would argue it is inevitable that teachers would decouple the meaning of their work from serving the economy.
But I think this is a good thing.
Yes, the goal of shop class was manufacturing competency, but it was probably taught by someone that extolled craftsmanship and attention-to-detail rather than drilling efficiency. A hobbyist wood-worker, not a retired factory foreman. The former approach would clearly have been more transferrable and less brittle.
So I think instilling adaptability is already pretty well baked-in to how most teachers automatically push students towards higher-level skills and meaning instead of tightly coupling to policy mandates.
> With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself.
I assure you, you cannot.
Go ahead and make a USB A-B cable from scratch. A 30-year-old product that retails for $2 so hardly 'advanced manufacturing'.
Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons.
Yes it must go beyond the mere desire to have children produce economically valuable output. However this is easier said when the costs (to recipients and public taxpayers) are much smaller.
> More oral defense of arguments. [...] More [...] work in which students must explain not only what a result shows but what it does not.
More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?"
In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in a popular textbook, which despite years of use, and qc passes for multiple editions, has numbers for solid Argon. Reality checking, a feel for reasonable values, a "Is this approximation plausible here?", being pervasively "not on the exam".
There's a meme, "Why develop one's own expertise? It's a poor investment. When you need it, you can hire it." Does AI make us all trust-fund kids?
An intro-physics educator at a first-tier university, observes that their entering students, having attended such well-funded schools, with such highly-skilled teachers, presenting material so clearly... widely lack both the skills and inclination to wrestle with a body of knowledge to extract their own understanding. To the detriment of their early-college education. The sci-ed snark version is, raising all students to the level of these, would be both an unimaginably immense triumph, and an ongoing profound failing to teach well. Will AI give everyone material presented so clearly?
"[AI] tempts us to mistake verbal fluency for understanding itself. A student can submit polished prose without having really grappled with the question. A researcher can produce a competent summary without having seen the problem clearly. A professional can sound informed without having formed a judgment. The danger is not only dishonesty - it is substitution."
There are lots of HN commenters who dislike formal education. Many of them seem to admire people who dropped out of school but became wealthy without earning a degree, like Zuckerberg, Gates and so on
Greg Brockman of OpenAI is another college dropout
For me real education happened when I had other stakeholders involved in that project and I was the sole person assigned to do it. From just school books I rarely learned a skill per say
34 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 49.4 ms ] threadHe's talking about scholasticism[1], but that has issues of its own[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Criticisms
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.
It's curious that most game shows require a vast knowledge of useless trivia rather than reasoning skills.
'all you anti-medical compound people who keep crack illegal and it's use limited are stifling medical progress'
Wanting to approach LLMs with intention and thought is not inherently 'technophobic'.
Better to to tie education of words and numbers to their use. What happened to shop class?
> The profession of priesthood is basically one of words.
As above, a lot more to it. Lots of time spent on pastoral work.
> Yes, there is day labor in some charitable activities, but those same activities are performed by non-Catholics and the irreligious as well.
So? That does not prevent it from being a part of being a Catholic of being a priest.
The cost of shop class. The region where I grew up abandoned shop class and orchestra as the tax base declined due to industry moving to the South. Meanwhile, my mom taught CS at an extension campus of a state university, and her students were getting high paying jobs as programmers after one year of instruction.
There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.
I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.
I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
For the last century, a lot of jobs have shifted from making stuff (food, goods, etc.) to providing services. So education has shifted to that and soft skills are now important. You can use a calculator if you need some numbers. It's fine if you don't do that in your head. You study something comparatively niche and useless and then you become a manager, consultant, marketing expert, or whatever that has very little connection to what you studied (history, antropology, whatever). The important skills that were taught are critical thinking, communicating, etc. Ironically, a lot of people with backgrounds like that are reverting to doing things with their hands in the end. Our cities are full of coffee shops, bakeries, jewellery makers, restaurants, etc. run by people with college degrees.
Modern AI driven technology is undoing the industrial revolution and creating a new one. The industrial revolution was all about uniformity and centralization to drive economies of scale. That meant people had to have the same baseline of skills so they could do the simple jobs that they were assigned to do. The smarter ones got promoted up. And you could build a lot with many people doing simple things like that. The bigger the company, the more money it made.
With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. You don't need a big company around you. That actually slows you down. The old services industry ran on soft skills. This new way of manufacturing runs on hard skills. And because its AI assisted you can do more at a small scale. Provided you understand what needs doing. Companies can be small, hyper specialized, and derive value from that. Their customers are other companies. Together they resemble what a pre-industrial revolution town would look like. Lots of specialists trades and shops all working together to produce wealth for the town. Instead of doing everything inside one big company, you now have complex clusters of companies, individuals, contractors, etc. working together.
Education has to focus on teaching people how to function in a world like that. It has to teach them not just one skill or trade but how to be able to adapt and combine different skills.
But I think this is a good thing.
Yes, the goal of shop class was manufacturing competency, but it was probably taught by someone that extolled craftsmanship and attention-to-detail rather than drilling efficiency. A hobbyist wood-worker, not a retired factory foreman. The former approach would clearly have been more transferrable and less brittle.
So I think instilling adaptability is already pretty well baked-in to how most teachers automatically push students towards higher-level skills and meaning instead of tightly coupling to policy mandates.
I assure you, you cannot.
Go ahead and make a USB A-B cable from scratch. A 30-year-old product that retails for $2 so hardly 'advanced manufacturing'.
Also, Pangram says 100% AI generated (some sections with high confidence): https://www.pangram.com/history/af8d47c1-dcbd-48ed-83a8-eda6...
More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?"
In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in a popular textbook, which despite years of use, and qc passes for multiple editions, has numbers for solid Argon. Reality checking, a feel for reasonable values, a "Is this approximation plausible here?", being pervasively "not on the exam".
There's a meme, "Why develop one's own expertise? It's a poor investment. When you need it, you can hire it." Does AI make us all trust-fund kids?
An intro-physics educator at a first-tier university, observes that their entering students, having attended such well-funded schools, with such highly-skilled teachers, presenting material so clearly... widely lack both the skills and inclination to wrestle with a body of knowledge to extract their own understanding. To the detriment of their early-college education. The sci-ed snark version is, raising all students to the level of these, would be both an unimaginably immense triumph, and an ongoing profound failing to teach well. Will AI give everyone material presented so clearly?
There are lots of HN commenters who dislike formal education. Many of them seem to admire people who dropped out of school but became wealthy without earning a degree, like Zuckerberg, Gates and so on
Greg Brockman of OpenAI is another college dropout