Gongol.com Archives: August 2025
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August 1, 2025
One source: To discover quite by accident something you didn't know you wanted to know. It's a delightful gift to stumble into learning something new without having sought it. But you have to practice being open to surprise and wonder, or else it won't happen.
August 3, 2025
An AI do-and-don't list for teachers - part 1
The school year typically begins in earnest in mid-August, and one of the hot topics for teachers this school year will be the reach of artificial intelligence tools both inside and outside the classroom. As with every other new piece of educational technology, there are good ways and bad ways to put it to use. Some recommendations follow. ■ DON'T tell students that artificial intelligence will replace the jobs they want. Technological change always causes changes to the labor force, but very few jobs are eliminated entirely. Telling young people their hoped-for careers will be replaced is discouraging -- and even labor economists rarely dare to predict the future with that much certainty. ■ DO tell students to look for opportunities to maximize the gap between what they have to give up to have a career and what they get back in reward. Encourage them to think about the path to a "dream job" as a series of opportunities that require trade-offs, like spending time in college, climbing a seniority ladder, or sacrificing other opportunities. On the other side, people are rewarded with more than just money: Social approval, work-life balance, respect, and many other factors are involved. The difference between what you get and what you give up to get it is what matters. ■ DON'T vilify all artificial intelligence tools equally. As with every technology, there are good and bad uses, which depend on the character of the user. (Even a kitchen knife can be used to lovingly prepare a meal or to commit cold-blooded murder.) ■ DO explain the limits of the usefulness of all technological tools, using real terms. Machine learning has the potential to do extraordinary things when large volumes of data are involved, as in medical research. But it also has the capacity to create terrible pain to real people when it's used to do truly ghoulish things like generating spammy obituaries. ■ DON'T promote unquestioning faith in the answers generated by artificial intelligence tools. Just because Google and other high-profile services are nudging people to use their AI tools doesn't make them more trustworthy or credible. It only means they're potentially profitable. ■ DO show students how to incorporate AI-generated content into a careful search process, including how to cross-reference among sources and how to independently verify what is often served with great authority. Show examples of dangerous and stupid errors that can and should be checked by humans, like obvious biographical and historical errors, scientific mistakes, or falsified reporting.
August 4, 2025
If you want a quotation to be remembered, misattribute it to someone famous. Winston Churchill "said" lots of things he didn't really say. Albert Einstein, too. And almost nobody has more misattributions than Abraham Lincoln, whose gift for language and exceptional place in history combine to make him a particularly good "source" for many a memorable bon mot. ■ One of those misattributions is "If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first three sharpening my axe." It's a terrific proverb, really, even if Lincoln didn't say it. And it's particularly timely at the moment. ■ Conor Sen, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg, ignited a mild online controversy by declaring, "My gut feeling is that parents trying to make their kids elite at reading and writing as a backlash against our screen/video world are like teaching their kids the Dewey decimal system, microfiche, driving a stick shift." He added: "There's not going to be much interesting written content post-2020's." ■ Sometimes people are merely stirring the pot, especially online. But the comments seem to have been taken in earnest by others, and Sen himself has defended the take. ■ Putting aside what Sen intended by "elite at reading and writing" (probably a reference to a recent "sign of the times" article in a high-status publication), reading and writing generally are probably the best examples of "axe-sharpening" life skills that anyone can develop. They prepare the way for practically all other worthwhile endeavors. It's not a matter of elite behavior; in fact, it's quite the opposite. ■ The skills of literacy are valued most by those to whom they are denied. When Booker T. Washington tells in his autobiography how "From the time that I can remember having any thoughts about anything, I recall that I had an intense longing to learn to read", he conveys a desire that wouldn't have been different, even if he had lived in a "screen/video world". ■ Much can be conveyed by the routes of oral transmission (video, music, speech, radio, or tales told around the campfire). But nothing in thousands of years of human civilization has exceeded the capacity of the well-written (and usually carefully-edited) written word to convey knowledge, meaning, and depth. ■ The cultural pendulum has swung far in the direction of the oral formats for now, but it's an episodic event, not a permanent change. Even barbarians ultimately come to regret that something is missing. Either things begin to fall apart at the societal level or, individually, they respond to the very same innate spark that animated Booker T. Washington to know that his early illiteracy deprived him of something he wanted very much. Human nature is curious. Plenty more remains to be both read and written.