Gaashk
1d ago
Sure. That's in the drunk college student, but way way faster realm. Nice to have, provides consumer surplus at free tier or $20/month, but probably not $200/month.
Gaashk
1d ago
Word processors already look for typos that are actual words, but don't make sense in the current context, without applying AI. More and better autocorrect is about in line with the original thesis -- they're good at spreadsheet scale tasks, which is useful but not a huge amount of a given person's job. I'm not completely sure what professional editors do, but I think it's probably a bit deeper than looking for typos.
Gaashk
2d ago
Having poked at ChatGPT a bit, I'm not particularly surprised. If I think of a job it could potentially do that I understand, like graphic designer, Chat GPT (the only LLM/diffusion router I've personally tried) is about as good as a drunk college student, but much, much faster. There are some use cases for that -- the sort of project that's basically fake and nobody actually cares about or gets any value out of, but someone said it should be done. "I'll have GPT do that" basically means that it's considered meaningless drivel no matter who does it.
I suppose at some point it'll be able to make materials not only quickly, but also well -- but that day is not today.
Gaashk
2d ago
Yes, but anything hyper local is too much even for my laughably nonexistent opsec.
Gaashk
3d ago
There is a part of me that thinks the people in these social groups are otherwise reasonable, but they are also caught up in the social mania of modern times. I would like to be more social and make more friends, but the social norms of the spaces around me make me uncomfortable and closed-off to people. There don’t appear to be spaces near me without the straight white men are problematic norm for the areas I’m interested in (such as book clubs or running clubs).
The problem with the niche crunchy con book clubs is that they're organized in person, often at churches, so you wouldn't know unless you, say, attended the church or somehow made friends through other means, but I can't think of how. My parents are in a very nice book club that's currently reading some 19th Century Russian intellectual, and previously read Death Comes for the Archbishop, GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, and so on. It was formed through their local Antiochian Orthodox Church. My dad also plays tennis with his church friends, specifically, including from a church he attended 30 years ago, they both changed churches several times since, but they continue to be tennis friends.
You might say that you don't believe in Jesus any more than you believe that white men are still benefiting from unearned privilege, and fair enough. But social groups gain cohesion through either a shared moral narrative, or shared ethnic identity. I suppose an alternative is an ethnic club -- I've still seen Celtic and Greek clubs anyway, perhaps there are others? I've also still seen evidence of current activity from the Elks and Rotary Clubs, I'm not sure what they're like, but they donate eyeglasses to children anyway.
Gaashk
10d ago
I got it to write some emergency (and therefore generic) substitute plans, and it produced a downloadable doc, which probably saved me three hours, so I appreciate that. Apparently Teachers Pay Teachers is now a bit scammy, and also I'm unwilling to spend my own money on that kind of thing.
I tried getting some advice on a personal project a month or so ago, and GPT 4 kept saying things like "that's awesomely profound and deep!" with each step, which was annoying, but I hear the new model might be better, and also it does better when just told to knock it off, which I didn't try.
GPT 4 hasn't been very useful for conversation, since by default it produces essay length answers (and sycophancy), but I haven't tried any other models.
It's been reasonably useful for summarizing light research and making concept art.
Gaashk
10d ago
Modern elementary school does have a much stronger childcare component than neighborhood schools in the past (though not necessarily more than boarding schools, which were somewhat more common). I could certainly imagine heading in the direction of educational assistants supervising children as they learn from interactive digital materials, or several educational assistants directly teaching phonics to the children if the older teachers find it too unbearably boring.
As far as hiring a 16 year old who's likely to quit to form her own family after six year or so, vs a 23 year old who's likely to take maternity leave at some point for an elementary teacher, it just depends on what the prevailing life path for the society in general is. As you mentioned elsewhere, elementary teachers are pretty conformist, and will teach at 16 if that's the Done Thing, or else go to college if that's the way to show you're conscientious and normal. I doubt there's a way back at this point, since generalist labor is increasingly automated, so there isn't that much demand for even more very young women to work before having kids.
Gaashk
10d ago
I don't think it's insane, necessarily, but I can't think of any way to test it off the top of my head, either.
There is a strong case for elementary schools, specifically, and even very conservative communities generally have them. Apparently the Puritans had them, the Amish often have them, Catholic parishes, etc. People who can't do reading, writing, and arithmetic really are at a huge disadvantage, and homeschooling is pretty niche. Even historically, sometimes housewives would also educate their own children to the same standard as a school, but often not. Even Muslim countries have to be very strict indeed to stop sending little girls to elementary school. Sometimes very conservative communities specify only unmarried women can teach, though.
Calling elementary school teaching a jobs program for women doesn't make any more sense than calling policing departments a job program for men.
Elementary special education and the various specialty positions that come with it is largely misguided, in my opinion. But they are not very attractive jobs, as evidenced by the many, many unfilled openings, and the average woman is not very well suited to filling them. Teachers are upset when asked to transfer to SE, and complain about it constantly. There are two sides to that: the low function/high needs self enclosed classrooms, and the inclusion kids on IEPs. The former is probably a function of better healthcare and smaller family units, and is extremely staff intensive, but also extremely draining for the women staffing those positions. Not only the kids themselves (there are a decent number of women suited well enough to that when they're small enough not to be physically threatening), but the compliance paperwork. The overlap between the legal skills and the care work skills is pretty low. Schools are a bit embarrassed about how many SE employees they have, and struggle to hire for those positions.
Junior high and high school are more controversial, but also include more men as workers.
Gaashk
10d ago
I agree with this. Every time I watch a board meeting, they're pretty explicit about it. It's what people were actually upset about during Covid.
Gaashk
11d ago
That would probably be useful.
I felt irritated about the assertion above, but didn't bother spending energy responding to it, because it's basically just boo outgroup. People being motivated by making money is a fully general complaint, and it was two of the three complaints. As for the third claim -- I provide childcare, you are an overeducated babysitter, she is separating children from their parents.
Gaashk
11d ago
My local schools are not as conservative as Mississippi, but they're in that ballpark. Their two main SEL initiatives are associating emotions with colors ("I'm in the red zone" instead of "I'm really angry and freaking out", or "we need to get in the green zone to be ready to learn"), and Character Strong words of the month (kindness, gratitude, courage, etc). I'm not completely sure what they're trying to accomplish with the color zone stuff, I've never heard the kids actually use it that I can recall. The Character Strong words seem fine. Pretty generic. My daughter's SEL teacher gave us a list of books she'll be reading with all the grade levels, I haven't gone through it yet.
Gaashk
11d ago
There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.
Gaashk
11d ago
It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".
Gaashk
11d ago
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
Gaashk
11d ago
Elementary schools are a bit paranoid that someone out there might be a murderer, and might come to their school, but I haven't heard any I've been in suggest that their students themselves might become murderers, and should instead choose not to.
Gaashk
11d ago
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they are a foundational part of our civilization, and it's good for people to know about and consider them, so I would certainly address them in the curriculum at some point. On the other hand, they're kind of appropriate as actual classroom rules.
I am the LORD your God; you shall not have strange gods before me.
Clearly inappropriate for American public schools.
You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
I don't think religious people even agree about what this means, and also not appropriate for American public schools.
Remember to keep holy the LORD’s Day.
They get Saturday and Sunday off, anyway. It would be an improvement on playing Roblox all weekend, but not seriously taught in public schools.
Honor your father and mother.
Good advice. Public schools like to focus on the dishonorable parents, with messaging like this Mother's Day, think about all the women who are unable to be mothers, or are estranged from their mothers, and how sad they are. This would probably be a net improvement.
You shall not murder.
Schools are very serious about this one.
You shall not commit adultery.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
You shall not steal.
Schools are and should be serious about this.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
Schools should be more serious than they are about this.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
Inappropriate for children.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.
Schools should be much more serious about this, and especially about flaunting your goods at your neighbor to try to bait them into covetousness.
So I guess that's half of them, where the Commandments and schools align, though they probably wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder, even.
Gaashk
11d ago
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
Gaashk
11d ago
I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.
Good for them.
I haven't read the others, but as I recall Freddie's position is explicitly that, yes, there are better and worse teaching methods, and that teaching can and sometimes does improve. And that's good! More kids can read when teaching improves! But to the extent that the improvements are important and sustainable, everyone else will pick up on it fast enough, and then everyone will be back in their relative positions again, but now with more people able to read (again: good and worth doing).
The test for that is whether in a decade, (assuming people still care how many kids can read and haven't just switched to voice interfaces for a large chunk of the population) Mississippi ends up exactly where you would expect them to be, based on their demographics. They already have to adjust for demographics to look really impressive. Tenth is good, but not groundbreaking.
You can also get programs that are good but not sustainable, like KIPP. It's sort of sustainable, because New York schools in general are able to absorb all the burnt out teachers leaving there, and supply a constant stream of new, talented, excited teachers. But it's not sustainable at scale, you can't just replace all the normal schools in a state with KIPP schools, because in addition to teacher burnout, you have to have family buy in, which is a limited resource. I suppose whatever Mississippi is doing is reasonably sustainable, or they would have flamed out by now.
Yeah, it wasn't very good. Also the weird speech from Jesus about their legal drama with Paramount. I didn't feel offended, but kind of bored and confused, like their characters should go grill pill at Casa Molina or something. There was a funny scene with Randy talking to his digital assistant with his wife looking grumpy next to him. There was an episode where everyone came in from Denver and tried to order cortados from a few years back was pretty funny. Scott's most recent Bay Area House Party post would make a good episode.
Gaashk
13d ago
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
I looked at the new, improved GPT5 free content I got today, and, lol, there are 18 in a single response. But then it generated a .docx of basically the same content, and lo and behold, the em dashes are gone, and now there are a lot of colons instead. Also, it's formatted nicely with headings. Huh.
What is he angry about? Is there an alternative to his current setting that's feasible, and where he wouldn't be angry? Sometimes there isn't, but also sometimes there is. Anger is often meant to spur people into action, to change their circumstances. Teenage boys are often physically stronger than their teachers, and really can't express anger towards them. It will certainly get him fired quickly from many jobs. But, also, the extremely restrictive prison like environment of many schools, where they can't even leave campus for lunch, isn't inevitable.
I went to community college instead of high school -- technically I was "duel enrolled" as a homeschool student, but I wasn't really studying anything in particular other than the college classes. I was angry or shocked a couple of times, so I left, sat under a tree grumping for a while, complained to my parents, and then came back a couple of days later for the next class. As long as I did my work, nobody much cared.
I also taught at an alternative high school in a small town. The teens often just didn't come to class, probably two days a week. If they were angry that day, I wouldn't want them to come to class, they were better off going for a hike in the woods or something.
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