Tag: school

Daily Life, Government, Solving the wrong problem

The Future Is Information Mining

Way back in the horse and buggy days when I went to school, the focus was still on the three “R’s”. Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. The learning methodology was still based upon the Prussian public school system. Be quiet and obedient. Listen to the lesson. Do the homework. Rote memorization. Take a test to prove you’ve memorized the material. I don’t think we’ve evolved much beyond that. Oh sure there’s been technological advances and challenges, but that’s nothing new. I’m old enough to remember when the pocket calculator became affordable. Teachers were petrified that students would “cheat” by using a calculator. We were admonished to not use one at home because you won’t really learn and you won’t get to use one for the test.

Smart phones and the internet brought new challenges for teachers. The answers to everything are a click away. How do you keep kids from cheating? A number of years ago I went back to school and had a number of online classes. The teachers solution to test taking in that environment was to have timed tests. You were given just enough time to answer all the questions, assuming you understood the material. If you tried to look things up you’d run out of time.

And now we have AI, smart watches, and the new Apple Vision Pro spatial computer. The challenge for teachers today to ensure the student is learning and not cheating is almost insurmountable. The question is, should they even bother any more? Is rote memorization still the appropriate way to teach and learn?

With the entirety of human knowledge a click away, why do I need to memorize the times tables or what the names of the generals in the civil war were? I can get an AI-generated summary of any subject or question I might have, instantly. I can find a video to teach anything I might want to know for free. There’s entire catalogs of free courses on just about anything. I learned more from the online Khan Academy videos teaching chemistry than the college professor I paid $$$ to sit in front of for months. What role does school play now that all knowledge is instantly available to everyone?

I’d argue that the future is not learning information – it’s learning how to find information. And perhaps more importantly, how to evaluate and present information. As we saw with Google’s disastrous Gemini image generation roll-out, machine learning is still influenced by humans with bias. Teaching kids to evaluate and think about what they see is probably the most valuable skill we could give them. And we’re failing miserably at it.

If you weren’t already aware, the CIA and NSA have been conducting massive disinformation campaigns here in the US, as well as across the world. The monitor every word written in social media and build machine learning heat maps of trending topics and words. They work with the big social media companies to suppress topics they don’t want to give voice to. They then plant stories with news agencies and bot farms to trend more favorable topics.

The vast majority of the public is not terribly tech savvy and we seem to have lost the ability to think critically. We simply consume whatever information is in front of us and take it as the gospel truth. We mindlessly scroll through our social media, taking our “knowledge” in one or two sentence chunks. Our TV news consists of 30 second “hits” crafted to fit the bias of whatever your cable news channel of choice is. I don’t think most people really understand how curated the information they consume has become. The days of watching Walter Cronkite tell us what happened in the world today are long gone.

Perhaps scarier is our loss of attention span. There’s a reason Facebook/Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts are the most popular formats out there. It’s like crack. 10-20 second videos designed to keep you scrolling like a zombie. How many of you know that that Facebook/Instagram tracks exactly how long you spend looking at a post? They know how fast or slow you’re scrolling through the feed and serve up the content that you linger the longest over. The algorithm is constantly learning how best to keep feeding you content that keeps you scrolling.

The things you like, the products you buy, and the political views you have are all now driven by machine learning artificial intelligence. The older generation, the byproducts of traditional learning, are simply not equipped to evaluate the information they consume in a critical way. If we’re to survive the AI revolution, we need a new generation of kids who are taught how to navigate information warfare. Young adults who know how to find information, think critically, and navigate the brave new world without becoming digital slaves.

Right now our tech overlords are winning. Our school system is hopelessly outdated and is being kept that way on purpose. A new generation of kids with 15 second attention spans, incapable of human conversation and lacking any curiosity or sense of adventure are the future. They have no sense of history and assume whatever MSNBC tells them is true. DEI ensures that mediocrity is the norm. The CIA/NSA/Facebook/Google/Media cabal are shaping them into whatever they want. They are being turned into obedient little soldiers who will become the future leaders of the country. It’s pretty bleak if you think about it.

I’m not sure what the answer is. We need more Elon Musks in the world. Twitter/X is one of the last bastions of free speech and we need to ensure it survives. We need someone to create a school system/curriculum that teaches kids how to think, not what to think. A system that teaches them how to mine for information and fight back against the establishment.

Rather than the old Prussian system, perhaps we’ll call it… The Contrarian School. A nationwide group of homeschools, networked and sharing a common set of values towards learning. I can already see the conversation. Two moms at a playground. One mom asks the other, “So which school does your child go to?” The other mom replies, “Well, we’re Contrarians so we homeschool.” The first mom gathers up her kids and tells them to stay away from the Contrarian kids. They’re dangerous.

Hmmm. That has the makings of a novel. If only people still read books. Sigh.

Cool, Daily Life, Solving the wrong problem

Enjoying The Inside, Outside
  • As humans, it’s normal to take things for granted. Your health, your car starting, the sun rising, and indoor dining. I’m lucky that my state has allowed indoor dining for the most part during this horrible gift from China, the SARS-CoV-2 virus (I don’t think I’m allowed to say China or Wuhan virus anymore). Well, the last two days I’ve been on a road trip of sorts and my travel partner and I stopped in a cute little town and went to a promising looking brewpub. The hostess scurried outside and asked us if we had reservations. Who needs reservations at a brewpub? We said no and she replied that the only seat she had left was outside the tent and not under the heaters. What? We said ok because we were starving, so she seated us at a lone table away from four other tables under a makeshift tent. Keep in mind the outside temperature was in the twenties. This was all very confusing. I ran back to the car to get another jacket and then went inside to wash up in the facilities. Once inside I saw all the chairs stacked up on top of the tables and it suddenly dawned on me. This state does not allow indoor dining. It’s twenty frigg’n degrees and the state is forcing people to eat outdoors. I watched patrons arrive carrying huge thick blankets. The people in this state are so desperate to eat at a restaurant they’re willing to bring blankets and sit outside in twenty degree temps. Meanwhile, all the restaurant workers are inside walking around without masks. They only put them on when they came outside to serve patrons. What sort of dystopian nightmare is this? When our food came it was good… for about thirty seconds and then was stone cold. BECAUSE IT’S TWENTY GODDAM DEGREES OUTSIDE! It’s hard to describe the absolute lunacy that is a health official who thinks all this is a viable solution to the problem. And I’m saddened that as thinking, voting, citizens we’re all just meekly going along with this nonsense.
  • The aforementioned road trip was to pick up the new motorcycle I’ve previously mentioned. Oh, she is a thing of beauty. I’m already in love. This particular bike was pretty hard to find, so I ended have to go to a different state to buy it. Not an issue other than we’re currently experiencing a pretty significant snow storm, or a “winter weather advisory” as the weather service call it. I’m not a particularly smart fellow, so it didn’t dawn on me to rent an enclosed trailer. So my new beast had to travel across three states through a snow storm to get home. She was covered in a thick layer of road grime and ice by the time I got her in the garage. But, it’s an adventure bike and that’s what it was intended to do. It’s not some fancy Harley that only comes out when it’s a perfect 70 degrees. I figure it was the perfect baptism to adventure. I will however be spending the rest of the day cleaning her up. And dreaming about the adventures we’ll have. Once it stops snowing.
  • Twitter has decided to ban Project Veritas and it’s founder James O’Keefe’s accounts. Yep, no censorship here. Move along people, nothing to see.
  • This is an excellent video talking about the problem with electric vehicles. It’s not the cars that are the issue, it’s the lack of charging infrastructure. I have no problem with the idea of electric vehicles. I’ve even toyed with the idea of putting a deposit down on the Tesla Cyber truck (Mrs Troutdog would kill me). This country simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to support large numbers of electric vehicles, nor the drain it would put on the electrical grid. Not to mention how we’re going to produce all that electricity with only solar and wind power since we’re getting rid of all those nasty fossil fuel plants. I wonder if there’s another source of electricity that’s clean, safe, and proven? Like, say… nuclear? Why in the world this isn’t being even spoken about by the Green New Deal zealots is beyond me.
  • One of the many topics that came up during the previously mentioned road trip was the sad state of our public schools. For better or worse, Covid was the perfect inflection point for fundamentally changing how we teach our kids. We have the technology. We have the entirety of human knowledge instantly available. We have the ability to present information in ways that were unimaginable when I went to school. And when forced to move to remote, technology driven teaching, what did our educators do? Nothing. They’ve continued the same old way of teaching we’ve been doing since the beginning of time. We literally have clung to the Prussian education system from the 19th century. Someone stands in front of the class and lectures and the obedient students attempt to memorize. The only difference is they’re trying to do it on Zoom. Kids, make sure not to miss your 1pm Zoom math class! Why, why, why? This will be harsh to hear, but what should happen is to get rid of half the teachers. Replace them with IT people and digital content creators. The remaining teachers would be responsible for driving the curriculum and measuring student progress. The student to teacher ratio should only be limited by how many papers/projects/tests a teacher can grade. Those teachers can be, gasp, located anywhere in the country. We want teachers who can put out amazing interactive digital content that engages kids in the same ways they’ll be working and producing at their jobs in the future. Meanwhile I suspect we have many teachers that lament we no longer have library books and encyclopedias to look up facts. If I had kids and was forced to go the “remote” learning route, I’d certainly be looking into some sort of Khan Academy type of learning. Our public schools are doing our kids a massive disservice and the teacher’s unions and elected officials are happily going along with it. Change is scary. But pretending the digital age isn’t real is dooming our kids to fail in the future.
  • And because at heart I’m still a ten year old who likes fart jokes, enjoy some mugshots of people with crazy fake eyebrows.

Song of the day: Hole – Celebrity Skin (live)