Stephen Downes

I hadn't read this 2024 article before, because (of course) it was behind a paywall, but via Fredrik Graver there's an archive link available, and so I was able to enjoy it in full. The premise, which I do not dispute, is that the system of 'meritocracy' in American society has failed. David Brooks offers several explanations, which divide into three categories (in my view): 'intelligence' measures the wrong thing, the game is rigged, and the result divides society into elite progressives and more conservative working class. The problem, for Brooks, isn't that the system divides the nation into a hierarchy - a stratification of society is inevitable, he says. It is that it divides it the wrong way, putting the wrong people in charge. Merit ought to based on four crucial qualities: curiosity, drive, social intelligence, and agility (the ability to learn from experience). To develo and recognize these, he argues, schools should emphasize project-based learning, an independent assessment system ought to be established, and what he calls 'opportunity pluralism'. I think there's a lot of merit in this article, but the faith in an elite, however defined, undermines it. You just can't put that much power into the hands of that few people, however defined. Society cannot survive as a scale free network; there have to be limits. Contemporary American society (and to an large extent, global society) represents a failure to set such limits, with a small elite living to excess, and the large majority suffering the consequences of that.

This article is based on the following premise, which I want to challenge: "Universities should assess independent competence (what a student can recall, reason through and explain without delegating the task) separately from AI-assisted performance." Almost everything a person does today is to some (usually large) extent delegated. We use motors to transport ourselves, books and articles and pen and paper to remember, calculators and computers to reason, and manufacturing plants to make. In many fields, and especially management related fields, accomplishing things through delegation is the core task. So the effort to assess what we can do independently isn't just futile, it's fundamentally misguided. The real issue is the way we pit the assessment of people with a lot of ability to delegate (i.e., the rich) against those with much more limited capacity to delegate (i.e., the poor). (The Washingtom post is usually paywalled, but it's letting me read this article, but here's the archive version, just in case).

I agree with the argument made in favour of open source AI offered here by Tim O'Reilly. "I believe that the big labs are making the same strategic mistake that Netscape and Microsoft made in the mid 90s. Yes, make the models more reliable for ordinary users. But don't shut down the options for developers who don't work for you to push the state of the art forward. As Bill Joy put it decades ago, 'No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.' No one should have a monopoly on innovation, and no one should be building a moat to hold it back."

What I like about this article is that it makes it clear that there is no single way to support what they call education for the poor. As the diagram says, "no single layer solves it alone". And it offers an effective counter to single-minded programs (such as the religious and charter schools recommended in Deseret News, via the always negative Joanne Jacobs). My view: There's a lot of data showing a correlation between socio-economic status and learning outcomes, which is why support programs, including dental and health care, sit alongside good pedagogy and access to resources as essential elements in educational equity. As I said in the very first few issues of OLDaily some 25 years ago, if you want children to do better at school, feed them. (The downside of this article: it's from a very sketchy source, Unlock Knowledge and Talent Upliftment (UKTU), "an independent human-vetter informational framework". I probably should never have linked to it, but now I'm here, I may as well pass it along as a cautionary note).   

It's important, I think, to understand that this article is focused specifically on recall of facts, and not cognition generally (though there are people out there who will no doubt conflate the two). It's interesting because of the way it describes five sources of failure of factual recall based on "one of five knowledge profiles: (1) encoding failure, (2) recall failure, (3) direct recall, (4) recall with thinking, and (5) inference without encoding." The authors "suggest that recall is tightly coupled to the conditions under which a fact was learned. When the query diverges from the training-time context, phrasing, or ordering in which the fact was encountered, recall becomes harder."

This interview (25 page PDF) is accurately described by the abstract, which frankly I would not recommend reading beyond (why link it here? for the record). "Tracing GenAI's origins from an Epstein-funded symposium and the Pentagon's chequebook to the eugenic roots of Silicon Valley's culture, Popenici contends that AI is the political project of 'technofascist' billionaires rather than a neutral educational tool." The article is historically dubious, narrowly focused, and conspiracy theory clickbait.