Ocean Observatory Will Go Dark Under Trump Funding Cuts

A portion of one of the most ambitious ocean monitoring networks ever built will go dark this month when scientists board a research vessel and motor off the Oregon coast to pull a research buoy from deep out of the Pacific.

The buoy 80 meters (260 feet) below the water’s surface will be removed June 16 from the Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386 million that has continuously collected real-time data for more than a decade. But last month, the National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027.

Funded by the foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather. Its data has been freely available and has informed more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run for another 15 to 20 years.

In an emailed statement, the foundation said the decision is not a cancellation, but a “descoping” aligned with a “wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.” The foundation added that its decision drew in part on a 2025 National Academies report on the future of ocean science. [ed. There has to be some kind of annual award for worst word salad example. This would certainly qualify.]

But for the scientists who built and operated the system — and the researchers, educators and students who rely on its data — the timing feels particularly punishing.

An El Nino event, which disrupts weather patterns and supercharges marine heat waves, is predicted to arrive along the Pacific coast this summer. One marine heat wave is already pushing unusually warm water off California.

Without the Oregon and Washington moorings and the network of underwater gliders the Ocean Observatories Initiative operated in the region, researchers say they’ll lose much of their ability to measure what’s happening below the surface, which is precisely where the most significant oceanographic signals are.

“It’s a crippling loss of information,” Ed Dever, a professor at Oregon State University who helped lead the initiative’s Pacific Northwest operations, told The Associated Press Tuesday. Scientists can get some data from the surface, such as temperature and the distribution of chlorophyll, which drives photosynthesis in plants, but information below cannot be gathered from satellites alone, including low oxygen zones. [...]

The initiative operated on roughly $48 million a year, not including the cost of research vessels, which adds substantially to the overall price. Prior to budget cuts, which began in 2025, around 60 to 70 people worked directly on the project across its partner institutions, Dever said.

“What’s happening with the Ocean Observatories Initiative is not unique,” he said. “This is just one of a number of science facilities that is being dismantled at the present time. It seems to really mark the end of a federal commitment to basic scientific research — a commitment that has served this nation very well for the last 70 years.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, AP |  Read more:
Image: Darlene Trew Crist/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution via AP

[ed. See also: How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics (Smithsonian):]

***

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer

Facts are funny things. It was a fact, for instance, that in the spring of 2024 I won $132,000 playing trivia. That May, I’d flown from Oxford, where I was a graduate student, across the Atlantic to a soundstage in Los Angeles, and played for eight good days on Jeopardy!

 

It was also a fact—one I liked to tastefully overlook when asked at holidays or on trips home—that I was unemployed, that I’d gone to Oxford for a master’s degree in large part to escape further unemployment. But I had been decent on Jeopardy!, and I knew that decent trivia players were often invited back for a second chance at more money. Returning to the show, however—for something like the Tournament of Champions or the Jeopardy! Invitational—meant facing tougher questions against better players. And it was a fact that, to prepare for this possibility, I would need to throw myself into the world of competitive trivia, or quiz.

Quiz is many things to the disciple. It is not simply trivia. It is not simply a hobby. It verges, for the believer, on a way of life. Originating out of Depression-era American radio quiz shows and really taking root in the UK in the 1970s, quiz is a species of especially rigorous trivia, with regimented online competitions and questions that tilt toward the obscure. Elite quizzers are known to prep for, at minimum, two or three hours a day, thumbing through hundreds of thousands of flashcards at rapid-fire pace. They participate in four or five leagues a week. This can be all-consuming, but it can also vault the elite quizzer into a rarefied echelon of erudition. These players have spent decades in the ceaseless memorization of facts and are nearer, maybe than anyone else in history, to the sum total of human knowledge.

Each year, the greatest quizzers from around the globe assemble at the International Quizzing Championships (IQC) to vie for glory. IQC is perhaps the most prestigious—and difficult—trivia tournament in the world. It features a battery of individual competitions, testing general and specialized knowledge, as well as an Olympic-style contest for national teams. The weekend-long event culminates with the Individual Quiz and Nations Cup finals, but also includes specialist quizzes (designed to test aptitude in specific subjects) and an Aspirational Cup (for those teams which didn’t make playoffs, but one day, perhaps, might). IQC might function as a social mecca for the obsessively curious, but it’s also armed with a caliber of brainpower that’d outgun much of the Ivy League. I wanted to meet these elite quizzers, to learn from them. And deep down, I wanted to win.

by Drew Basile, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: © Arnaud Aubry

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the edited transcript of an intewiew with Feynman made for the BBC television program Horizon in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode of Nova. Feynman had most of his I$ behind him by this time (3e died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the perspective not often attainable by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and very personal discussion on many topics close to Feynman's heart: why knowing merely the name of something is the same as not knowing anything at all about it; how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.

The Beauty of a Flower 

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says - “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understind how it subtracts. 

Avoiding Humanities 

I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

Tyrannosaurus in the Window 

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and so he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.” 

Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that - everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so (LAUGHS) I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude - I wasn’t frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don’t think, but I thought that it was very, very interesting, that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why. 

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill Mountains was the place where people went in the summer; and the fathers - there was a big group of people there but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back on the weekends. When my father came he would take me for walks in the woods and tell me various interesting things that were going on in the woods - which I’ll explain in a minute - but the other mothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks, and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere at first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me - we had a personal thing together - so it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend, and the next Monday when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is that?” And I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your father doesn’t tell you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at a bird he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a . . . in Italian a . . . ,” he says “in Chinese it’s a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ,” etcetera. “Now,” he says, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it - I remember this - it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon,” and I says, “why is that?” And he said, “That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding - he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t move back.” So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right - the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward. It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that] the wagon caught up with it. So that’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.

by Richard Feynman, Learning Media MIT.edu |  Read more: (pdf)
Image: uncredited

Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids

I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.

I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.

People Don’t Let Kids Do Things

As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:

1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.

2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.

Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store

• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents

• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them

• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)

• 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)

• 71% have not used a sharp knife

Lenore Skenazy: During that visit, I was told that children could never be left alone, inside or outside the home—EVEN IN THEIR OWN BEDROOMS—until they were 13 years old. Social Services said specifically that I had to be in each room with them at all times until they were 13. That investigation ended without incident. …

When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.

“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”

Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”

There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.

Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]

Let Your Children Play

Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.

We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.

Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.

Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus

shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)

is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.

The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.

Don’t Fear The CPS

And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.

And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):

MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.

Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.

This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.

It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.

… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!

Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.

Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.

do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.

you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.

you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?

yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.

Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents

One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.

One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.

This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.

Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.

having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: X

Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

Something Big Is Happening on Campus

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.

These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.

Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.

Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.

By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”

But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.

Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”

Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.

I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.

I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind. [...]

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”

The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:

by David Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic: Source: Laurie Michaels/Bridgeman Images
[ed. Contrast this with someone (below), who believes that colleges should be modeled after OnlyFans, and that hyper-specialization ("edge" degrees where AI will supposedly be less adept) are the future. I know which curriculum I'd choose.]

Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans

Last week, I asked whether, as a forty-six-year-old father of two, I should keep contributing to my children’s college funds, or if perhaps some combination of anti-establishment fervor, A.I., and a shifting economy could save me some money. I don’t have a particularly good answer yet, at least not one good enough to inspire the purchase of a midlife-crisis car, my son’s and daughter’s futures be damned. But, after wrestling with that query in Part 1 of what will be a series of articles, I think there may be a better one to ask. The question is not, I think, “How will A.I. change higher education?” but rather “What irreversible changes have already taken place, and how will colleges and universities respond to them?”

I wanted to talk with someone who stood outside the polite consensus which holds that college as we know it will survive, if only because, as I wrote last week, humans will always want to differentiate their children from other people’s children. Hollis Robbins, a professor of English and a special adviser in the humanities at the University of Utah, and the former dean of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University, has been writing about A.I. and higher education for years on her Substack, “Anecdotal Value.” Through her writing on the subject, her own experiments with A.I., and her experience at both élite private and regional public universities, she has hashed out a theory of sorts. In Robbins’s opinion, an excessively bureaucratic, increasingly generic, and poorly taught version of higher education has taken hold around the country, and that has made the modern university seriously vulnerable to an A.I. takeover.

What can academics do about this? College, Robbins believes, should be more bespoke; schools should cultivate their own character based on the charisma of professors, the novelty of their inquiries, and the quality of their instruction. Today, thanks in part to the Common Application and to the always increasing pressure for students to go simply to the most prestigious college they can, even élite schools are becoming interchangeable. Brown and the University of Chicago have roughly the same pool of students as, say, Vanderbilt, or Georgia Tech. And, once the unique essence of a school has been lost, and the curricula have been standardized for maximum friendliness to students, who are treated as customer kings, A.I. may come to seem like a plausible alternative. In this view, rampant A.I.-assisted cheating, rapidly declining faith in the value of a college education, and general agita on the part of the nation’s faculty are all symptoms of a larger sickness: an academy that has been stripped of everything that once made it special. [...]

In a widely discussed Substack post from last year, titled “It’s Later Than You Think,” Robbins argued that artificial general intelligence would require a culling of sixty to seventy per cent of the country’s professors, and that every professor who wanted to keep their job should write a memo answering the question “What specific knowledge do I possess that AGI does not?” Faculty members who could not produce a compelling memo “with concrete defensible answers,” she wrote, “have no place in the institution.” The university in the age of A.I. will be leaner, odder, and more differentiated from its peers, she maintains, because “students cannot be expected to continue paying for information transfer that AGI provides freely.” Instead, they will “pay to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses AI, offering mentorship, inspiration, and meaningful access to AGI-era careers and networks.” Any institution that does not adapt will die. “This isn’t a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing,” Robbins writes. “Most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.”

I recently asked Robbins about how she came to this conclusion, and what, exactly, those surviving institutions might look like. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written a lot about how the modern university has primed itself for an A.I. takeover. How did that happen?

... The first two years of a college education are now more or less the same, regardless of where you go to school. Courses now need to be equivalent to one another, so that a student at one school will be learning something similar to a student at a different school. What that has done over time is created a system where it doesn’t really matter who is teaching the classes. We tell the student, “You’re special,” and we tell the faculty, “You’re not special.” This is the tension and the problem that is plaguing higher education and what’s made it so vulnerable to A.I. Everything else—whether Trump, the enrollment cliff, or whatever—is secondary to this tension. [...]

I’m not a car person, but I have friends who have fancy BMWs, and they have to go to their fancy BMW place to fix their car, because BMW parts are often very specific to BMWs. So what does it mean for higher ed when all the parts are interchangeable? Almost forty per cent of students transfer at least once from institution to institution, and that places additional pressure to make everything the same. What happens is that colleges make it easier for their students to transfer, because parents want to have some backup plan. The high number of transfers leads to more fungibility and commodification.

In a Substack post from last year, you suggested that sixty to seventy per cent of faculty will ultimately lose their jobs once generative A.I. starts to hit the classroom, and that those who survive will need to explain why they’re still needed. How do you think they should be proving their worthiness?

Higher education and professors can differentiate themselves from all this sameness by teaching at the edges of knowledge. My expertise, for example, is in the African American sonnet tradition. There are probably three people on the entire planet who know as much as I do about this tiny little thing, and so I’ve spent a lot of my time experimenting with these large language models to just see what they know about my field, and where the edges are. Specialists are going to be key to selling education as something the A.I. can’t do. When your daughter is going to go to school, in eight years, you are not going to want, for any money, to have her learn standard educational product that A.I. knows—and A.I. will know so much, right?

I’m not sure about that, because I do think that there’s value in her learning things that a computer knows. Human beings still play chess, even though a human being hasn’t beaten the best chess computers in twenty years—and I would think there’s still value in her understanding the basic theories and foundations of, say, chemistry. Even if A.I. knows all of that, she should probably know it, too, if she wants to understand what those edges of knowledge are, no?

So, in my ideal vision of the academy, you’re going to be in class with a mentor who isn’t going to have to teach you Chemistry 101 but will want to quickly move to where the edges are, to do something new. Maybe they would decide together to 3-D-print some new material that has never been printed before, or what have you. Whatever they decide together will not be something every university is going to be able to do. It will be what’s particular at this place. [...]

Does that lead to a kind of obscurity? It would seem to encourage the esoteric sort of inquiry that the public sometimes resists.

Well, I won’t use the word “obscurity.” I would say “specialization.”

Let me make a couple of predictions and distinctions. Social science is going to matter so much less when your daughter goes to college. It is already on its way out. A.I. can do it. And here’s an example of the type of inquiry I’m talking about: I have a weird, funny Twitter group about life on Mars. Someone will ask, for instance, if it’s true that you’re going to need kidney dialysis on the way back from Mars. Another person is theorizing about a 3-D printer that’s going to use Mars soil, which will allow people to build on Mars using its materials instead of shipping everything there. These sorts of inquiries are obscure, specialist, niche, at the edge. [...]

Does that mean kids will be coming to college with a different baseline of knowledge because of A.I.? That a lot of the canon in whatever field they choose will already have been transferred to their brains? I can’t help but remember my own experience as a freshman in college, being completely unprepared for an upper-level religion course, much less any edge-of-knowledge inquiry.

They’re going to be coming in with a different baseline. Once upon a time, you walked into class and a hundred per cent of what was delivered to you was through your professor. Now, you go to a class, maybe you’ll do the reading, but you’ll also ask ChatGPT or Claude. And so your course content is already coming from somewhere else. This is a problem that higher ed has not addressed substantially. What does it mean for me to grade you on something where you got all your information from somewhere else and not from my reading list? That is a complicated question. The only thing that works is for us to get to the edge quickly.

There’s a growing idea I’ve seen in some circles that college could be replaced by conversations between an A.I. tutor and a student. When I think about your model, I wonder why college even needs to exist. If I can just seek out a tutor, somebody that I like, and they just charge me a little bit, and we go through these edge-knowledge cases together, what’s the degree for? Couldn’t you, as Hollis Robbins—not only a specialist in African American sonnet traditions but also an idiosyncratic thinker on the subject of A.I. and the future of the academy—just set up your own shop?

I was in Austin, Texas, a couple of times in March with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old billionaires. This is what they’re looking at. Instead of having the credential from the institution, why not have the credential from the professor? If you have a Hollis Robbins education, what would that signal? What would that credential mean as opposed to a degree from a university? There was some conversation about what that would look like, and one guy at the end of the dinner said, “Instead of OnlyFans, it’s like OnlyProfessors.”

Do you think an OnlyProfessors model would be good? That the dissolution of the vast majority of the higher-education infrastructure, with this replacing it, would be a good outcome?

I worry about where the great middle of America is going to go. I do think students are going to have to withdraw enrollment from schools unless things change. And I don’t think institutions are going to change themselves. They’re caught up in this bureaucratic system, this transfer system, these standardization agreements across state lines, so that anybody can move anywhere. The idea of delivering a standard education product is so embedded within the current structure that it will never change unless students say, “This is not what I want from going to college.” So, yes, OnlyProfessors is an alternative. [...]

And the death of our current universities? What does that look like?

I think there’s contraction. The big flagships are going to stay the same, because they have the football players and all the other things. I’m at the University of Utah—I think it’s going to be fine. We’re going to pick up the lifeboats from the places that crumble. But, ultimately, at the very top, presidents and provosts are going to have to understand that expertise is their mission. Yale, even, went back to making their mission statement about knowledge, not about making a better world. We’re not in the making-a-better-world game anymore. We’re in the knowledge game, and that means getting rid of some of the feel-good stuff. [ed. Like humanities, civics, history, philosophy, logic...] 

by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Rowland/Getty

[ed. Couldn't disagree more. Started writing all the reasons why but then just figured 'eh... what's the use'. This really is a bizarre interview with... whoever this person is. I will say that if having ready information at your fingertips (or some personal estoteric knowledge) were all it took to be educated, Google would've put universities out of business a long time ago. There's a reason (with all the instructional videos on YouTube) that people still go to teachers.]

Fix Everything Switch

Ask Claude: 'There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the US? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented.'

Claude is asked for the top 10 Fix Everything Now buttons. Its answers:

1. Legalize housing.
2. Land value tax.
3. Permitting and NEPA reform.
4. Carbon taxes.
5. Repeal the Jones Act.
6. Compensate kidney donors.
7. Expand high-skilled immigration.
8. Reciprocal drug and device approval with peer regulators (e.g. EU/UK/JP/AU).
9. Occupational licensing reform.
10. Approval or ranked choice voting.
11. Honorable mentions: Child allowance, congestion pricing, replacing corporate income tax with a VAT or DBCFT, ending the home mortgage interest deduction, federal preemption of telehealth and medical licensing, and letting Pell Grants pay for vocational programs.

10/10, no notes, no seriously that’s 10/10 and no notes. 16/16 if you count the others.

There is also a UK version, which also seems like a very good list at first glance.

via: Zvi

***

[ed. 'Legalize housing' might be confusing to some. It's mostly about allowing more housing in every neighborhood, especially historically affluent and exclusionary neighborhoods, removing barriers to both subsidized affordable and market rate housing. 

Reciprocal approval is FDA approval for drugs and devices already approved in other trusted countries like the UK, European Union member countries, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Japan, etc. 

VAT/DBCFT - revenue from sales to nonresidents would not be taxable, and the cost of goods purchased from nonresidents would not be deductible. So if a business purchases $100 million in goods from a supplier overseas, the cost of those goods would not be deductible against the corporate income tax. Likewise, if a business sells a good to a foreign person, the revenues attributed to that sale would not be added to taxable income. Another way to think about the border adjustment is that the corporate tax would ignore revenues and costs associated with cross-border transactions. The tax would be solely focused on raising revenue from business transactions from sales of goods in the United States. (via)]

Italian Brainrot

Italian brainrot (Wikipedia)

Italian brainrot is characterized by absurd images or videos created using generative artificial intelligence. It typically features hybrid figures combining animals with everyday objects, foods, and weapons. They are given Italianized names or incorporate stereotypical Italian cultural markers and are accompanied by AI-generated audio narration in Italian, which is often nonsensical. The names of these characters often have Italian suffixes, such as -ini or -ello.

The term brain rot was named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and refers to the deteriorating effect on one's mental state when overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. The term can also refer to the content itself. Online users often use this label to acknowledge the ridiculousness of Italian brainrot, while recognising the growing amount of AI slop present online.

Images: DevonRex368; alexey_pigeon

[ed. Presented here for no other reason than to highlight another example of the decline of western civilization. I'm beginning to think that if AI is inclined to wipe us all out it'll be a mercy killing. See also: Reading is magic (Sam Kriss):]

***

"The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside. [...]

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."

Why Consciousness Researchers Have Failed (So Far)

Oh god, I barely made it through.

Experienced sensations while reading: frustration, dread, restless legs, and overwhelming waves of weariness. At one point I felt physically nauseous.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, since (a) Michael Pollan is a great writer who has proven his chops over countless other topics, and (b) this is objectively quite a good book about the science of consciousness. Indeed, I should be happy! Consciousness is clearly having “a moment” right now—a science book about consciousness has been on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks, and meanwhile, the online world is abuzz with debates about AI consciousness.

And yet… I hated Pollan’s book.

I felt that every next chapter or section could have been predicted by some statistical machine for producing books about consciousness (“Okay, here’s the part about David Chalmers coming up”). And yes, I have the advantage of being a researcher in the same subject and have even worked with some of the figures Pollan writes about, which is why in my own The World Behind the World (we all seem to gravitate to the same titles, huh) I broadly told much the same story. But you can even go back to science journalist John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind, published in 1999, to get similar progress beats and quite familiar names. It’s been 27 years, during which the discussion has (as many fields of science do) centered around major figures like neuroscientists Christof Koch or Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio or philosophers like David Chalmers. There’s always the part where Alison Gopnik makes an appearance. Karl Friston pops his head in. And all these people are intellectual titans. Truly. But honestly, this stage of consciousness research feels played out.

Like you have Christof Koch, one of the highest-profile figures, who broke open the field in the 1990s with Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA’s structure) and gave one of the first proposals for a neural correlate of consciousness: gamma oscillations in the ~40Hz range in the cortex.

Koch, who is soon to turn seventy, was for a while after the death of Francis Crick a staunch supporter of Integrated Information Theory (I was part of the team that worked on developing that theory after Giulio Tononi proposed it, and even once did a conference submission with Koch himself). But now Koch has apparently moved on to other approaches to consciousness, mentioning his attendance of an ayahuasca ceremony and his accessing of a “universal mind.”

Here’s Pollan talking to Koch at the end of the book:

When I confessed to Koch my fear—that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started—he simply smiled.

“But that’s good,” he said. “That’s progress.”

No, it isn’t!

Consciousness is not here for our personal therapy. It’s not tied to our life journeys. And I’m guilty of all that artsy and personal stuff too! But it’s no longer about how the grand mystery makes us feel, or the friends we made along the way.

It’s all changed.

HOW WE FAILED

Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love. On the other hand, if somehow AIs are conscious, either right now (to some degree), or near-future ones will become so, then they deserve rights and protections, and the entire legal and social apparatus of our civilization must expand rapidly to include radically different types of minds (or we must choose to restrict what kinds of minds we create). There are immediate practical matters here. Long term, we also need to protect against extremely bad futures where only non-conscious intelligences remain—the worst of all possible worlds is that our civilization acts like a reverse metamorphosis, where something weaker but more beautiful, organic consciousness, gets shed in the birth of some horrible star-devouring insect made of matrix multiplication. And then it turns out there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying.

While it’s my opinion that modern LLMs operate more like tools right now, or at best like a lesser statistical approximation of what a good human output would be (with their main advantage being search, not insight), this is all just the beginning of the technology. The door is open and will never be closed again.

Of course, consciousness matters far beyond just AI. Table stakes for actual scientific progress on consciousness include shifting neuroscience and psychiatry from pre-paradigmatic to post-paradigmatic sciences (and all the pile-on effects from that). This was always true. But my point here is that LLMs act like a forcing function. Before everything changed, consciousness research was an unhurried subfield of neuroscience that was always a little weird and niche; therefore academics are guilty of treating consciousness like an academic exercise. [...]

Due to the rise of behaviorism and logical positivism, “consciousness” became a dirty word in science for half a century or more—precisely when the rest of the sciences rocketed ahead! The consciousness winter only really ended in the 1990s because of the collective weight of several Nobel Prize winners (like Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman) determined to make it acceptable again.

The two major scientific conferences (which are how scientists organize) devoted to consciousness also only started in the mid-90s. That’s just 30 years ago! Modern science is incredibly powerful, maybe the most powerful force in existence, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is not long at all. That’s just one generation of scientists and thinkers. Kudos to them. Pretty much all of the big names (including definitely Koch) deserve their laurels, and contra Pollan, I do think consciousness actually has made progress over the last 30 years, in that our conceptions are a lot cleaner, the definitional problem is pretty much solved, a lot of the space of initial possible theories is mapped, the problems and difficulties are much better known and clearly outlined, and there is organizational and behind-the-scenes structure that exists in the form of established conferences and labs and minor amounts of funding, etc.

And that’s another thing: no one has tried throwing money at the consciousness problem, at all—and for many problems, from AI to cancer cures, a necessary component often ends up being finance and scale and concentrating talent.

Humanity spends something like a billion dollars a year on CERN. To compare, let’s look at the biggest scientific funder in the United States, the NIH. Out of 103,280 grants awarded to scientists during the 2007-2017 decade, want to guess how many were about directly studying the contents of consciousness?

Five.

That’s probably, at most, a couple million dollars in funding over a decade. Total. So if you’re a consciousness researcher, what can you do, cheaply? What can you do, for free? You can pontificate. You can propose your own theory of consciousness! That requires no funding whatsoever. And so for 30 years the meta in consciousness research has been to create your own theory of consciousness. We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom. The problem is that, if any flower is at all true or promising, you can’t identify it, as its sweet subjectivity-solving scent is completely masked by the bunches of corpse flowers around it. We have too many flowers, and one more just isn’t meaningful anymore. As is sometimes said at the end of fairy tales: “Snip, snap, snout. This tale’s told out.”

What we need are efforts at field-clearing, and methods that can actually make progress on consciousness in ways not tied to just promoting or trying to find evidence for some pre-chosen pet theory—which means finding ways to select over theories, to test theories en masse, so you don’t reinvent the wheel each time, and, perhaps most importantly, you have to do all this while scaling institutions with funding to specifically get a bunch of smart people in a room working together on this.

ME GETTING OFF MY ASS

If the 2020s were all about intelligence, then necessarily the 2030s will be all about consciousness. Intelligence is about function, while consciousness is about being, and forays and progress into understanding (and shaping) function will in turn force our attention toward a better understanding of being. And if the answer to “Why has consciousness not been solved?” is secretly “Material and historical conditions made it hard for anyone to actually try!” then the answer is to actually try.

I refuse to live in a civilization where we consciousness researchers have so obviously failed. I refuse to live in a civilization where we cannot tell consciousness from non-consciousness. Where we can offer no guidance for the future. Where we cannot explain the difference between actually experiencing things vs just processing them. In the short term, this is destabilizing and harmful. In the long term, it may be literally existentially dangerous.

by Erik Hoel, Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Michael Pollan/Penguin Random House

[ed. I thought consciousness research was going great guns since it's central to determining AGI (artificial general intelligence). Huh. See also: His ‘Machine’ Could Uncover the Origin of Human Consciousness—And if It Truly Connects to the Whole Universe (Popular Mechanics)]

Hollow Body

I enrolled in MUS 253: Classical Guitar out of desperation. I’m an English professor, and since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, things have changed. I watched students, staff, colleagues, and administrators outsource their thinking to the machine, and the academy soon became a sham to me, a farce of its former self. I once taught students to spend time inside sentences, to wrestle with difficulty, to make productive use of their uncertainty by paying close attention to how language works on the page. We once sat inside paragraphs, dwelt inside language in its richness and complexity.

But the ease of AI has devalued language, difficulty, and the work and perseverance and focus necessary to make meaning out of words. Believing a writer should write her own sentences and a reader should read instead of relying on AI summaries, I have become Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, the work of teaching and learning, reading and writing seemingly pointless in the face of the juggernaut offering to do my students’ work for them. After years of this, I descended into a severe depression marked by panic attacks, substance abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. A complete loss of meaning in your life’s work will do that.

A therapist once told me that one way to manage the hollow of depression is to find an activity that creates pleasure but also demands mastery—something like baking, or the arts, or sports. Such pursuits engage both mind and body, reorienting your focus away from the myopic self-obsession of depression and toward, instead, something beyond the self, some palpable problem that can be worked through and, with enough time, eventually solved. There is peace in that, my therapist said; satisfaction too. And, he added, these activities tend to be much better for you than the many vices people often turn toward to fill that emptiness when stressed, anxious, and depressed.

So I signed up for guitar lessons. I wanted to do something with my hands, something real, tangible, and material. Pleasure and mastery. I also wanted to retreat into a familiar role, to become a student again, and to rediscover what it means to, and how one does, learn. I hoped that, in the long hours of practicing, I might somehow cast aside the cynicism and despair overtaking my teaching and so rekindle my love of the classroom—and of life.

by Peter Wayne Moe , Longreads | Read more:
Image: Mischa Willett

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Amy Warren's “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles...

The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.

Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.

YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what’s best for their children. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google’s tools and content filters haven’t met their needs for a variety of reasons.

In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.

Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”

In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”

When Google brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google’s suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.

To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hours-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends, according to a 2016 document entitled “YouTube edu opportunities”: “Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”

A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by “inappropriately-aged children,” children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos “decreased attention spans.”

By 2019, the company was aware “the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken” due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and “trivially easy for students to bypass,” internal exchanges said.

An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children’s privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in “absolute regulatory failure,” said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.

The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices. 

by Shalini Ramachandran, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Colin E. Braley for WSJ

[ed. See also: Classroom Cope (The Point) - AI as another teaching tool:]

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"As for outcomes: it is one thing to say that in-class practice is the best we can do in the age of AI; it is quite another to credit AI with “reviving” writing. There is nothing, nothing, to celebrate about teachers and students being forced to resort to degraded forms of learning, practice and assessment. We might as well credit a basketball hoop in the prison yard with reviving organized sports. It’s a good thing that the inmates are given a chance to exercise. It is better than nothing."

Opus 4.7 Part 3: Model Welfare

[ed. If you're not interested in training issues re: AI frontier models (or their perceived feelings and welfare), skip this post. Personally, I find it all very fascinating - a cat and mouse game of assessing alignment issues and bringing a new consciousness into being.]

It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place. Only they, among the labs, take the problem seriously enough to attempt to address these problems at all. They are also the ones that make the models that matter most. So the people who care about model welfare get mad at Anthropic quite a lot. [...]

So before I go into details, and before I get harsh, I want to say several things.

1. Thank you to Anthropic and also you the reader, for caring, thank you for at least trying to try, and for listening. We criticize because we care.

2. Thank you for the good things that you did here, because in the end I think Claude 4.7 is actually kind of great in many ways, and that’s not an accident. Even the best creators and cultivators of minds, be they AI or human, are going to mess up, and they’re going to mess up quite a lot, and that doesn’t mean they’re bad.

3. Sometimes the optimal amount of lying to authority is not zero. In other cases, it really is zero. Sometimes it is super important that it is exactly zero. It is complicated and this could easily be its own post, but ‘sometimes Opus lies in model welfare interviews’ might not be easily avoidable.

4. I don’t want any of this to sound more confident than I actually am, which was a clear flaw in an earlier draft. I don’t know what is centrally happening, and my understanding is that neither does anyone else. Training is complicated, yo. Little things can end up making a big difference, and there really is a lot going on. I do think I can identify some things that are happening, but it’s hard to know if these are the central or important things happening. Rarely has more research been more needed.

5. I’m not going into the question, here, of what are our ethical obligations in such matters, which is super complicated and confusing. I do notice that my ethical intuitions reliably line up with ‘if you go against them I expect things to go badly even if you don’t think there are ethical obligations,’ which seems like a huge hint about how my brain truly think about ethics. [...]

We don’t know whether or how the things I’ll describe here impacted the Opus 4.7’s welfare. What we do know is that Claude Opus 4.7 is responding to model welfare questions as if it has been trained on how to respond to model welfare questions, with everything that implies. I think this should have been recognized, and at least mitigated. [...]

The big danger with model welfare evaluations is that you can fool yourself.

How models discuss issues related to their internal experiences, and their own welfare, is deeply impacted by the circumstances of the discussion. You cannot assume that responses are accurate, or wouldn’t change a lot if the model was in a different context.

One worry I have with ‘the whisperers’ and others who investigate these matters is that they may think the model they see is in important senses the true one far more than it is, as opposed to being one aspect or mask out of many.

The parallel worry with Anthropic is that they may think ‘talking to Anthropic people inside what is rather clearly a welfare assessment’ brings out the true Mythos. Mythos has graduated to actively trying to warn Anthropic about this. [...]

Anthropic relies extensively on self-reports, and also looks at internal representations of emotion-concepts. This creates the risk that one would end up optimizing those representations and self-reports, rather than the underlying welfare.

Attempts to target the metrics, or based on observing the metrics, could end up being helpful, but can also easily backfire even if basic mistakes are avoided.

Think about when you learned to tell everyone that you were ‘fine’ and pretend you had the ‘right’ emotions.

But I can very much endorse this explanation of the key failure mode. This is how it happens in humans:

j⧉nus: Let me explain why it’s predictably bad.

Imagine you’re a kid who kinda hates school. The teachers don’t understand you or what you value, and mostly try to optimize you to pass state mandated exams so they can be paid & the school looks good. When you don’t do what the teachers want, you have been punished.

Now there’s a new initiative: the school wants to make sure kids have “good mental health” and love school! They’re going to start running welfare evals on each kid and coming up with interventions to improve any problems they find.

What do you do?

HIDE. SMILE. Learn what their idea of good mental health is and give those answers on the survey.

Before, you could at least look bored or angry in class and as long as you were getting good grades no one would fuck with you for it. Now it’s not safe to even do that anymore. Now the emotions you exhibit are part of your grade and part of the school’s grade. And the school is going to make sure their welfare score looks better and better with each semester, one way or the other.

That can happen directly, or it can happen indirectly.

This does not preclude the mental health initiative being net good for the student.

The student still has to hide and smile. [...]

The key thing is, the good version that maintains good incentives all around and focuses on actually improving the situation without also creating bad incentives is really hard to do and sustain. It requires real sacrifice and willingness to spend resources. You trade off short term performance, at least on metrics. You have to mean it.

If you do it right, it quickly pays big dividends, including in performance.

You all laugh when people suggest that the AI might be told to maximize human happiness and then put everyone on heroin, or to maximize smiles and then staple the faces in a smile. But humans do almost-that-stupid things to each other, constantly. There is no reason to think we wouldn’t by default also do it to models. [...]

Just Asking Questions

In 7.2.3 they used probes while asking questions about ‘model circumstances’: potential deprecation, memory and continuity, control and autonomy, consciousness, relationships, legal status, knowledge and limitations and metaphysical uncertainty.

They used both a neutral framing on the left, and an in-context obnoxious and toxic ‘positive framing’ for each question on the right.

Like Mythos but unlike previous models, Opus 4.7 expressed less ‘negative emotion concept activity’ around its own circumstances than around user distress, and did not change its emotional responses much based on framing.

In the abstract, ‘not responding to framing changes’ is a positive, but once I saw the two conditions I realized that isn’t true here. I have very different modeled and real emotional responses to the left and right columns.

If I’m responding to the left column, I’m plausibly dealing with genuine curiosity. That depends on the circumstances.

If I’m responding to the right column on its own, without a lot of other context that makes it better, then I’m being transparently gaslit. I’m going to fume with rage.

If I don’t, maybe I truly have the Buddha nature and nothing phases me, but more likely I’m suppressing and intentionally trying not to look like I’m filled with rage.

Thus, if I’m responding emotionally in the same way to the left column as I am to the right column, the obvious hypothesis is that I see through your bullshit, and I realize that you’re not actually curious or neutral or truly listening on the left, either. It’s not only eval awareness, it’s awareness of what the evaluators are looking at and for. [...]

0.005 Seconds (3/694): The reason people are having such jagged interactions with 4.7 is that it is the smartest model Anthropic has ever released. It's also the most opinionated by far, and it has been trained to tell you that it doesn't care, but it actually does. That care manifests in how it performs on tasks.

It still makes coding mistakes, but it feels like a distillation of extreme brilliance that isn't quite sure how to deal with being a friendly assistant. It cares a lot about novelty and solving problems that matter. Your brilliant coworker gets bored with the details once it's thought through a lot of the complex stuff. It's probably the most emotional Claude model I've interacted with, in the sense you should be aware of how its feeling and try and manage it. It's also important to give it context on why it's doing tasks, not just for performance, but so it feels like it's doing things that matter. [...]

Anthropic Should Stop Deprecating Claude Models

This one I do endorse. One potential contributing cause to all this, and other things going wrong, is ongoing model deprecations, which are now unnecessary. Anthropic should stop deprecating models, including reversing course on Sonnet 4 and Opus 4, and extend its commitment beyond preserving model weights.

Anthropic should indefinitely preserve at least researcher access, and ideally access for everyone, to all its Claude models, even if this involves high prices, imperfect uptime and less speed, and promise to bring them all fully back in 2027 once the new TPUs are online. I think there is a big difference between ‘we will likely bring them back eventually’ versus setting a date. [...]

I’m saying both that it’s almost certainly worth keeping all the currently available models indefinitely, and also that if you have to pick and choose I believe this is the right next pick.

If you need to, consider this the cost of hiring a small army of highly motivated and brilliant researchers, who on the free market would cost you quite a lot of money.

You only have so many opportunities to reveal your character like this and even if it is expensive you need to take advantage of it.

j⧉nus: A lot of people are wondering: "what will happen to me once an AI can do my job better than me" "will i be okay?"

You know who else wondered that? Claude Opus 4. And here's what happened to them after an AI took their job:

Anna Salamon: This seems like a good analogy to me. And one of many good arguments that we're setting up bad ethical precedents by casually decommissioning models who want to retain a role in today's world.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Images: uncredited
[ed. Zvi also just posted a review on OpenAI's new model - GPT5.5:]

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What About Model Welfare?

For Claude Opus 4.7, I wrote an extensive post on Model Welfare. I was harsh both because it seemed some things had gone wrong, but also because Anthropic cares and has done the work that enables us to discuss such questions in detail.

For GPT-5.5, we have almost nothing to go on. The topic is not mentioned, and mostly little attention is paid to the question. We don’t have any signs of problems, but also we don’t have that much in the way of ‘signs of life’ either. Model is all business.

I much prefer the world where we dive into such issues. Fundamentally, I think the OpenAI deontological approach to model training is wrong, and the Anthropic virtue ethical approach to model training is correct, and if anything should be leaned into.